Reinstalling Windows XP

The other day I decided to rebuild my computer. Rebuilding means wiping the drive and reinstalling everything from scratch. It's been three years since I've done this and thought it time to purge the machine of unused programs that were just taking up space.

It's usually a straight forward task: You backup your data, delete the drive contents, reinstall, and apply the latest patches. Easy, right? Admittedly I didn't do the full backup that I should have. I have two drives in the system and my work was to be limited to the drive that contains the applications and not the drive with the data. During the installation I got mixed up with the drive letters and deleted my data partition. Oops! That had me worried for a few hours until I restored the contents with this little application called TestDisk.

The installation of Windows went smoothly until I went to install the latest patches. Microsoft has an online tool for downloading and installing these patches, but unfortunately it requires you to be online. On three occassions my machine got infected by a worm or virus that exploited one of the security holes that these patches were trying to fix. I finally had a break and got the OS and patches installed with only a single and curable infection. In the future I would only attempt to do this again with a router that has a firewall.

The machine is finally working and is noticeably faster without the little drivers and applications that I had on my previous installation. I hope it stays this way.