Jefflog

Last week, I had the unfortunate task of rebuilding my Windows machine at work from scratch. I was attempting to upgrade a vendor-supplied component and was getting an error every time I tried to install it, no matter what I tried. After six hours of trying, I figured there must be something wrong with my computer, rolled up my sleeves, and began the task of backing everything up, wiping the hard drive clean, then restoring everything.

What a painful process that was. It takes several hours just to get all of the Microsoft patches downloaded and installed. Naturally, I’ve got a bunch of other utilities I use on a daily basis, so I had to install those as well. Then I have to reconfigure all of my programs just the way I like them. This last step could have been avoided by copying my local settings directory, but I figured it would be better to start fresh. All in all, three days of productivity wasted.

What’s more, it didn’t solve the original problem of installing the vendor component! I was able to figure out the source of the error, though, and when I contacted the vendor, they said, “Oh, that looks like a bug…”. Sure is!!

On the plus side, my system runs faster than ever. After using Windows for two years, no doubt it had collected a lot of cruft along the way. Maybe it had collected some spyware too; although I’m usually very careful about what I download and keep my security patches and firewall settings up to date, nasty things could have still gotten though.

Here’s another plus: I discovered Google Desktop. I just happened to be downloading it on the day they released their latest version. The new sidebar is very nice, and uses far less memory than Yahoo! Desktop Widgets (neé Konfabulator). I was always annoyed that Yahoo! Desktop Widgets could eat up 10 or 20 megabytes of memory PER WIDGET. The Google taskbar, on the other hand, seems to be very conservative, only taking about 18 megs while running 8 widgets, and that’s including the search-index crawler in the background indexing my files. It’s not as pretty as Yahoo! Desktop Widgets, but the eye candy isn’t worth an extra 100 megabytes to me.