The Great Reinstall of 2006

[torkell]

You never realise just how many drivers and updates there are on your computer until you do a full reinstall.

State so far of the Great System Reinstall of 2006:

• Backed up files I from the system partition that I want to keep
• Found all my program discs
• Fail to find floppy with network drivers
• Extract image of floppy with network drivers to a spare disk, then copy back to a folder somewhere
• Reformatted the partition
• Installed Windows 2000
• Set Win2k to speak English everywhere (as opposed to American)
• Re-ordered drive letters
• Install network drivers
• Tried to install Security Rollup 1
• Found that SRP1 needs Service Pack 4
• Found that I'd deleted SP4, thinking it wasn't needed
• Downloaded and installed SP4. Reboot
• Installed SRP1. Reboot
• Downloaded and installed latest nVidia drivers. Reboot
• 1280x960, show all refresh rates, 85Hz refresh
• Disable the extra nVidia stuff
• Attempt to visit Windows Update. Need Internet Explorer 6
• Download and install IE6 SP1. Reboot
• Attempt to visit Windows Update. Need some other updates. Reboot
• Visit Windows Update. Grab all the critical updates, and the root certificates update
• Have Windows Update fail to install the already installed SRP1. Stupid Windows Update. Reboot

Still to go (in roughly this order):

• Create my user account
• Set desktop options
• Redirect My Documents
• Set system settings (temp dir, enviroment vars, etc.)
• Install Norton
• Update Norton (several reboots)
• Make Norton behave properly
• Install Office
• Update Office
• Install Lotus Smartsuite
• Install drivers for HP über-printer-scanner
• Install drivers for sound cadr
• Install drivers and utilities for TV tuner
• Install Visual Studio 6
• Install MSDN library
• Install current Platform SDK
• Install DirectX 7 SDK
• Install DirectX 8 SDK
• Install DirectX 9 release
• Install InterVideo WinDVD, WinCoder and WinProducer
• Get Outlook Express to speak to 4 different IMAP servers and a pair of NNTP servers
• Make OE save emails somewhere sensible
• Recreate backup script. Copy ~20GB of data across
• Restore Outlook calender
• Install Bluetooth adapter. Make Bluetooth adapter speak to cellphone. Make Outlook speak to cellphone
• Install Palm Desktop. Make Palm Desktop speak to Palm
• Install Semagic. Make Semagic behave
• Install RSSOwl. Restore settings from backup
• Install Yahoo messenger. Install MSN messenger
• Restore custom utilites from backup
• Install WinVNC and stunnel. Restore certificates and tunnel config from backup
• Recreate network shares. Reset NTFS permissions on data partition
• Make Windows appear how I like
• Install Realone Player. Clobber Realone updater
• Install Quicktime. Clobber Quicktime updater
• Install Armagetron. Restore config from backup. Laugh as I cut the other Tron-bikes off while listening to music from XMPlay (ok, maybe not)

And probably much more.