Finally...

Well, I finally got around to reinstalling Windows XP. It had got unbearably slow, and got some trojans or some shit on it that I was too lazy to get rid of.

I got a "Robusto" version of XP, and boy do I like it.
Why? It auto installs everything itself (took about 1 hour). Including all my drivers, commonly used programs (Office, Nero, Photoshop, multimedia and internet apps, etc). It also sets all the Windows settings to pretty much how I like them (ie. default detail browsing view, etc). Plus, it's memory footprint is 35 mb instead of Windows XP default of about 70mb. It's the next best thing to doing a fresh install all yourself, customization, and then doing a drive backup.

This brings me onto the subject of Windows Vista (which, admittedly, I haven't tried yet.) Microsoft needs to give us a reason to upgrade. Many of us (myself included) upgraded from 9x to XP (or Windows 2000, almost the same operating system) because it was simply way better: not built from DOS like 9x, and not horribly unstable. These were features you wanted to upgrade for, because they are important to each and every user of the O/S.

Attention Microsoft: the following are not "features", however:

- an operating system requiring 1 GB of RAM and 128MB video memory. WTF does this new system do? Does it do my laundry and clean my house or something? Half Life 2 and Doom 3 both run sufficiently with 512 MB ram and a 64 MB video card. Microsoft wants to tell me Vista is more demanding than state of the art 3D games? I don't think so.

-Adding lots of extra crap that is useless and just makes the system footprint much bigger.

One reason I would buy Vista in the future: if it supported FLASH memory hard drives.

As flash memory or equivalent gets cheaper (4 GB sticks are reasonably priced now), eventually, I would like to have, at least,my Windows / commonly used apps/ maybe a few games on a silicon-based "hard drive".

Hard drives are great, really, but inevitably unreliable. Sure they work 99.9% of the time without fucking up, and are dirt cheap, but they are magnitudes slower than silicon based memory.