I got back to work on Friday after my day off recovering from a stomach bug to find my laptop sitting there with a shiney new and very empty hard drive. Thanks Dell.

I spent a couple of hours loading back on Windows XP. You can tell that Windows is due for a new major release, because is is now a right pain in the arse.

• Install from the XP service pack 1 disk from Dell.
• Mess around joining the domain, since neither of the laptops network cards are visible at XP install time, because both need extra drivers
• Install Service Pack 2 from a CD – at least we have one, heh
• Download about a dozen drivers from Dell, since they have ALL been superceeded in the last 18 months and every one on the supplied CDs is out-of-date
• Reinstall Easy CD Creator and WinDVD (Dell supplied apps), neither of which work with SP2 and need patches downloading and installing from Dell
• Run Windows update, I have to update Windows Update.
• Run Windows update, click Express update, I only get a revised copy of Windows Installer
• Run Windows update, click Express update, I have to go through a Windows Genuine Advantage confirmation stage
• Run Windows update, click Express update, and eventually get and install 31 updates, most of which are marked as security updates

Then I restored a backup containing a registry backup – bad move. I then wasted several hours trying to fix various annoying things that weren’t working right, such as VPNs. I gave up sometime Friday evening. Next time, just before restoring the backup I did a System Restore checkpoint. Immediately after the backup I checked and found the System Restore had lost everything! ARGHHH. This time Windows was REALLY mega stuffed by the registry restore.

Yesterday, did the whole thing a third and final time. Managed to restore the backup without restoring the registry. Everything went really well, and only took a few hours – sigh.