One thing that annoys me with Windows is how easily useless stuff builds up and never goes away until you stumble across it all. Sure you can trudge through it all and find uninstallers or manually remove it, but I usually find the best way is a simple reinstall of Windows. Oh, and by the way, I’m not talking about windows on your house, I’m talking about WindowsXP. :p
Over the past year I performed a number of hacks and mods, most of which can’t be removed. Two big ones I done were to add Media Center 2005 to XP Pro and add the sidebar from Vista.
So now, I’m currently going through Windows Setup (formatting at 25%), then comes the fun of installing drivers, updates and then finding all the programs that I use daily.
On the upside, this gives me a chance to look at what I use and see if there are any alternatives out there that may be better.
Some may wonder why I don’t just install Ubuntu (or other linux flavour), but the reason behind it is that I can do things much faster in Windows, I don’t really have time to tell Ubuntu who is boss trying to work it out, and I have a heap of Windows only programs that I use regularly and I don’t want to fart around with virtual machines, oh, and I stream to my Xbox360 and my wife doesn’t like Linux.
Reader Question: For you Windows users out there, how often do you do a fresh install of Windows and why? Any hints or tips I should take note of for next time?
