Just like starting over
I finally got jack of living with my 12 month old laptop being at cruft factor 6 - limping. For no apparant reason, 6 months ago my 'Hibernate' mode disappeared, which I'd grudgingly learned to live with, but the final straw was I decided I could no longer live without a working copy of SQL Server, and I was stuck with a botched install of an Express Edition beta I could neither roll forward nor back.
So while watching superbowl XL, I repaved. This is the first media-free rebuild I've ever done: not a single CD was harmed. On my Tecra A2, all I needed to do was hold down '0' during powerup, and re-image the original installation. It all went very smoothly, took about 15 minutes to blat a ghost image over the C:\ partition. Then powered up, back to a pristine windows install. There was a wizard that ran on first login, then once I hooked up to the home wifi, Norton A/V kicked off an auto-install & upgrade cycle that took about 30 minutes including 3 reboots.
Then it was down to the pointy end. This is the toolkit I've chosen for 2006:
- Visual Studio Express - C# and Web App versions, & MSDN.
- SQL Server 2005 Express Edition - with books online, which I'm going to bury my head in to get up to speed on the .Net integration
- ActiveState's ActivPerl and Komodo
- [updated 2008-02-06 - how could I forget Nunit ?]
I'm waiting for the 1.8.4 version of the one-click ruby installer to go gold before I snarf that. That will give me MySQL and SCiTE as well. Should be only a day or two off.
Reimaging a machine is always a bit nervewracking, trying to make sure that you've backed up all the data you care about. But this time round I'm not too concerned, since in the 12 months I've had this box, all the data I most care about seems to be in online apps - my mail is all at gmail, my photos all at flickr. Next time I need to reimage, I expect to have some important financial records as well, but if all goes according to plan, that should be online as well.