My computer was born again...

My computer was starting to irritate me. It was locking up and becoming unresponsive after it would come out of sleep. I tried everything I could think of with out any luck. I think the main problem was I installed SP1 for Vista myself. I should have waited for Windows update to install it naturally - I got inpatient and downloaded the full SP1 myself. This was apparently bad...

Here’s a general best practice I preach on a regular basis: my computer gets born again about once a year. Basically I back everything up, I delete the logical partitions on my main drives, reformat my drives and reinstall everything. You will be amazed at how fast your computer will be and how many problems are solved when you just nuke everything and reinstall.

I preach this but I don’t like doing this. The whole “born again” process is a religious experience most computer users avoid because no matter how you go about it the pain in the butt factor is high.

Considering my computer was being born again I decided to try something different. I tried to RAID 0 my two hard drives. I have two 500gb Western Digital drives (Western Digital drives are the best by the way). If I did a RAID 0 configuration on these drives, I would effectively have two drives become one. I would have a 1000gb drive (that's 1 terabyte baby). My motherboard supported it and I had the RAID controller enabled, but 3 hours later I couldn’t get the Windows install to see it. I finally gave up. I know I’m a computer whimp for not searching out Google for answers or even reading the documentation... It just occurred to me that I was wasting my life and I finally just formatted the drives independently.

The process of installing Vista was surprisingly easy. It took about a half an hour and all my drivers loaded, video was working properly, audio was working, my DVD drives where all alive and functioning. This would not have been the case with XP. I’m sure I will find stuff that didn’t install right and I will deal with that as it comes up.

Now comes the fun of installing all my applications.

This time I'm going to image my drive so I don't have to do this again!!