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‘jamie, the networking layers had it, i think your going to need to reinstall widowns and rebuild’...

uh…oh…

Well, that was tuesday afternoon, after spending the day with alun clearing the old office, martin went into work, and i set up my lappy, and started trying to connect to the network.

Not much luck there though! So alun had a try. After rebooting a moniterless Server, playing with nework cables and adapters we relized it wasent wanting anything to do with it. So that it, i had to bite the bullet and reinstall.

Now, i have been running the laptop on that instalation for about a year or so, it had been onto about 5 different networks and had been on a number of domains, it was starting to get tierd and i had kindove played with a few to many setting (warning: dont customise windows like it says you can, it only breaks) so after some ohhing and arring it was time to give it ago. This was the first time i had ever reinstalled a windows instalation of my own on my own so i was going to have some fun and learn alot on the way

Round 1:

okay, first job make a plan. alun was helpfull and leant me a copy of partition magic and told me to use it to make a backup partition and calling it D would make reinstalling easier later. so off with it i went home and last night i sat and i started. First i have to change the drive letter for the CD drive. i hadent done this in a long time and so after about 10 minites of clicking around i relised i had forgottern how. Then as i was speaking to martin, i found a usefull article in the help system that indirectly pointed me at how to do it.

So after resetting the CD drive to where it was meant to be living, i fired up partition magic and then i added a new partition to my drive. I named it D set it to arounf 15GB and set it going. The laptop had to restart so i waited as it all restarted. Now, in my playing i had turned off the nice GUI for loading in windows so when it loaded up all i saw was a list of drivers for 10 minites. Was very worrying, i though that it might fall over completely and i would be unable to recover my data .however i had noticed that the harddrive light was flashing and i knew as long as that light flashed then it should still stay running, so i continued to talk with martins untill he had to hang up.

So, after a little bit of thinking i had repartioned the drive and was ready to start backing up. Now, at this point i need to declare that i was not aware of the backup facility built into windows or the file moving system, so i went thought each area of the computer and idividually backed up each folder i though i would need, after about an hour i had copied all of about 3.5GB of important data onto my new D;/ partition and was ready for the reinstall.

So, i could remeber that to reinstall i wiould have to set lappy to boot from CD and then tell windows to reinstall after blanking the old file system. So after a few attempts at getting the CD to boot and then a few moment going though options that was it, it partiioned the drive and copied the new installation files across.

After a restart it loaded into the instalation finalisation stage and i had to wait as it configerd my new installation. windows quoted me 39 minites from start to end, so knowing the accuracy (or rather the lack of) in windows times i dicided i would go and get myself a drink as it installed.

I whached it for a while whilst reading the XP manual (Its a Piece of PR rubbish – dont bother with it!) and my PC magazine (thats better!). eventually it had finished and i was ready to start restoring my system.

Shortly, after rebooting into my new windows installation i copied across my important data (two copies are better than 1!) and then i inserted my driver disk and started installing drivers.

I did get a bit confused when the dell CD with the driver on had ticks by each of the drivers so i though it meant i had it, infact it meant i needed it. so i plugged on and instaled all the drivers.

I then went though and costimised backgrounds and set up my varios folders, then started instaling the powertoys and a varaty of different aplacations.

First the macromedia stuidio 8 suite. then all the other software untill i had it in a ready and going state.

next i installed the last of the required software, and then i set up picassa. Next i made a list of all the software which was going to be needed the today when i went to martins. it was really quite long!

Round 2:

now, today at martins i went hoping to be able to connect to his network and accsess the net, which i was lucky and was able to do. I had to pay alun a visit to get a CAT5 connection cable, but after i had done that it was fine.

Next i started downloading the software. After some strange widows problems i kept getting a load or errors, which i have taken most of the night to resolve. including itune’s not installing untill i had installed the sepreate quicktime and then reinstalled it after uninstalling some DVD software, and then some more challenge getting Xampp to work.

I still have to recompile my desktop (sort it to how i like it), get my keys for lots of bits of software (they are around somwhere i know) and sort of out a data backup plan, then i am able to sit back an relax, with my fully reloaded laptop.