Wow, I can't believe this got up before midnight...

(Since when did the Amish Tech Support Blog A Day Tour include personal diaries as a part of its journey? Well, I guess starting today it does. Is Laurence Simon capable of introspection on the level of most personal journal-keepers?)

I really haven’t done anything interesting today that’s worthy of deep soul-searching, I must admit. Today was taken up with finally biting the bullet and turning one of the three hard drives in this system into a fresh Windows install. I dipped into my notes and notebooks, put together a quick-and-dirty strategy, and then started moving around all the data files and archives and settings so that the new system drive could be scorched and built.

Clean as a whistle. The system started up so incredibly fast, utterly devoid of drivers or bells and whistles. It shut down like a flash, too.

Enjoy it while it lasts, dude.

Sure I could do this with a drive image I’ve saved up, but there’s something fun about starting from scratch on a blank canvas that I like. But still, it’s amazing how many checkboxes, redirections, and nuances that can be put on each application or accessory to customize the computing experience. Right now I’m looking at a shocking white background in Word when I’m used to having grey as the background. It’s more soothing on the eyes.

Did I do this to annoy myself because I really haven’t been deep-down annoyed over anything big?

So many toolbars and Traybar agents and desktop shortcuts want to be created. It’s amazing how folks who aren’t confident in what they’re doing with a computer manage to get a clean boot without conflicts from all this stuff wanting to run and clutter things up. The programs section of my Start bar is cluttering up, too. I like to tree that to keep the massive tree from getting too unwieldy.

Where did all my SendTo entries go? I wanted to SendoTo a notepad. I’ve got to get those back in there, too.

It’s also amazing how many files I’ve stored up to keep from having to download this garbage over and over and over again. I put on as many of them before having to load up the web-only patches and fixes. Here comes all of the Windows Update downloads… what a rush. Every update wants a reboot, so I’ll be up and down like leapfrog.

I figure I’ll run into all sorts of little things I’ve forgotten that I’ve done to speed things up or smooth over some annoyance. That’s why I’ve got my notebooks next to me to track them all for the next time I want to go clean without doing a drive image.

I hope I get this all finished before midnight so I can send this to Cosmicbabe to post. I’d hate to have messed up my Tour because I cut my throat with which I speak.