Woohoo, after a whole day of reformatting, partitioning, re-installing, etc, I have finally set up my laptop. This time I have 2 partitions, Windows XP has its own little partition so it can whirl away on its own, and everything else is on the rest of the drive. So if I have problems again next year, all I have to do is format the C:!
I’ve been getting emails from people who were going to comment (thats right! going to comment!) but could not, because I set it to registered users only. So now I have changed it, Anyone can comment, if you are registered or not. Don’t get me wrong, I still urge you to register: This does NOT mean you have to start up your own blog, you just get a free sign-in name to post comments and browse other blogs. But go ahead and post comments as much as you like, I urge you to!
I hope he doesn’t mind, but I am going to publish one of the emails I got as a comment on here for him, as it is relevant. But any more flames (anonymous comments saying something negative about me) and I will be forced to put comments back to registered users only.
So what did I do yesterday? Nothing much, just reformatting. PartitionMagic managed to completely feck up my whole drive, so its very lucky for me I did a backup before running it. Then I installed WinXP from the dodgy CD Alienware gave me (it has some files missing, but the tech support guy insists it will install fine. Lucky for me, it did). I watched a weird thing about Pagans, things like how they used to have sex with horses, very freaky, then after Big Brother I watched “101 things to do when you are dead”. Once again, very freaky.
This morning I managed to set up my broadband connection without installing all the BT Yahoo crap, much to my relief as I don’t want my laptop full of rubbish again. I installed all the security updates from the CD I ordered, and also went online and used windows update to get it up to date. After installing all my programs and setting FireFox to my default browser, I am now ready to go 🙂
Tomorrow I am seeing Terry, we should be going to the cinema to see Spiderman (last time he cancelled on me saying he was too tired, so we just stayed in instead). Looking quite forward to it because although I didn’t really like the first one, everyone is saying this one is much better. Will give you my opinion on it when I’ve been!
It’s Vilius’ birthday soon, so will probably go out to celebrate that. Will be the first time I go out with Terry in a LONG time, so I’m not sure how it will go.. ugh.
Anyway, thats it for now – remember to check out those comments.
– Shaun
[This comment was emailed to me]
Hello Shaun. I don’t have a blog and don’t want one so I couldn’t respond to your latest blog entry. Delving into “deep nerd” for a moment, a long format will also check for and attempt recovery of any bad sectors while formatting the partition, Must be something in the air at the mo as I just spent ALL weekend backing up my main 160Gb drive, low level formatting, long formatting and restoring as XP Pro was getting slooooow. In my case it turned out to be a flakey drive. I agree that its well worth a complete reinstall every now and again – but what a pain it is to go thru. I have used partition magic pro and drive image for several years and they are great provided you don’t have any flakey or corrupted sectors on your drive – otherwise you are screwed. I run AdAware 6 on my comp to get rid of any malware which might slow things down. I’ve recently been running HDD Health to keep a careful eye on my hard drives in case they grind to a halt. I hope things are all working again for you and thanks for continuing to write your blog. Cheers, Johnnie Giffin
Thanks for responding, and hope you didn’t mind me posting your comment. I also used to use Adaware 6 but found it wasn’t that great: after installing “Spybot Search and Destroy” I found it discovered much more spyware than adaware did, and it also has lots of advanced features. I recommend you check it out.
Hi Shaun.
Thanks for altering the requirements for posting to your blog (unless it get abused). I have no problems signing up for these things and I tried, but it asked me what my website/homepage was, and as I don’t have one, I closed the window and didn’t continue – perhaps I could have put google? I used to work for IBM as a technical disaster recovery consultant. However careful you are it is a pain in the butt to restore your system and not loose any data. I always do loooong formats on drives at customers/work/home as it is worth checking your drive is up to scratch and you are less likely to suffer data loss (yawn). Doing a quick format just nulls the file index and specifies the geometric boundaries of the partition (yawn again) but it doesn’t check the integrity of the drive. It is a very good idea to install your OS on one partition and your data and perhaps apps on another. As you say if/when you have to wipe your boot drive all the useful bits are still there. Having seen and experienced many computing disasters I recommend 1) a good backup regime to CD/DVD/tape/LAN and 2) if you have the space, install a second basic bootable OS which you could boot off cleanly if having probs with your main OS. You can do this with NT/2000/XP.
But I’m probably teaching you to suck eggs. You should work in this industry if you enjoy it.
Cheers,
Johnnie Giffin