Yesterday, while shopping around in Carrefour, yeah I know I said I would never go there again, but well it’s right next door and I’ve sort of figured out the best times to go. Anyway, while I was shopping around and checking out the tech stuff, I came across the shelf with the CD-Rs and stuff, or “CDs Vierges” (Virgin CDs) as they call them in French.
Seeing these piles of CD-Rs reminded me of my long planned, yet never done, format of my laptop. I mean, I’ve had this laptop for 4 years now, and it’s never been formatted. That’s abnormal, especially from an IT guy like me.
A load of crap is lying around on it’s hard disk everywhere, the Windows XP installation is barely breathing, and day after day it’s getting more and more impossible to work with.
So, I picked up a pack of 10 CDs, which I thought added to the CDs I have at home would be enough to back everything up, and as soon as I got home, started backing up every bit of information I need onto these CDs.
I backed up my photos, which needed 5 CDs on their own, my documents, my work files, my downloads, my rubbish and whatever else.
I finished backing everything up last night at midnight, and when I woke up this morning, I popped in the Recovery CD and chose the restore to factory settings option. After a bunch of warnings that all my data will be going to neverland, the laptop was restored to it’s orginal state, and what a pleasure that was.
I was thinking of throwing in a Linux distro next to Windows, but well, that’ll have to wait; Windows XP Home Edition should do for now.
I’m aiming to keep this a light installation with only the ultra necessary programs. I hope my curious testing side doesn’t take over again making a mess out of it all over again.
I found out that in the heat of the moment, I forgot to backup my email data, so I’ve lost every email that was downloaded to my hard disk through outlook express or thunderbird during the last 4 years, but well, not such a big deal, they’re mostly old emails.
I also lost all my fonts, which sucks, especially that it’ll be hard to find some good Arabic fonts all over again.
Other than that, all is fine, and here I am blogging from a faster, lighter installation.