[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