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Of course immediately following my Mac Poo-Pooing post I decide I want to switch back to Windows Vista. I figure now that SP1 is out that the kinks may be ironed into relative oblivion, or at least the ones that niggled me when I first ran it. Full disclosure, I’m going to format and do a clean install of XP when I get home today.

First thing I noticed that was positively nifty upon vista’s first-boot, and well worth noting if you want to give Vista a try, is that it saved all of my oldXP-installed software in a folder called Windows.old. All the installed software worked without any reinstallation necessary. That was really nice as I didn’t look forward to downloading hours upon hours worth of World of Warcraft patches. Very slick, and should definitely be mentioned to the user on Vista’s first boot, though it isn’t.

The niceties wore off quickly, though, as my hard drive wouldn’t stop reading and writing. I’m talking 30 minutes straight of “rrrzp click click rrrrzp rrrrzp”. It drove me nanners. I disabled system restore, set a hard virtual memory allocation (never let the computer determine the size. Give a hard min and max that are the same amount), disabled what I read to be problem services and still had no luck. The worst part of it all, though, was an an otherwise-awesome feature in vista that lets you see exactly what the computer is reading and writing at any given time. I could tell exactly what file was causing all the commotion, but I could not tell it to damn well stop. Why is this a bad thing? Because HD thrashing can cause considerable wear in a short period of time on the hard drive, rendering it inoperable much earlier than it would otherwise be expected.

Plus it’s loud and annoying.

Tonight, lady and gentleman, I backup a few more things to an external drive, perhaps the WoW folders themselves, and format my C drive. I will then reinstall Windows XP Home with slipstreamed SATA hard disk drivers, and go through the process of getting all my updates in a row and my ducks downloaded. The best part? I can’t really surf the net or do jack all on my laptop while I’m resetting my desktop, because I discovered yesterday that my laptop is totally dead. No power from the AC or battery is getting through, and it didn’t die while in use. Good times indeed.

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