YAWR - Yet Another Windows Reinstall
I’ve edited and updated the previous post in case you didn’t notice.
I mentioned that my computer wasn’t booting up, right? Well I called Ragha and he asked to try resetting the BIOS settings with the usual method (removing the circular BIOS battery and then putting it back in). Link to tutorial, if you want to know more. I’d forgotten about that and tried it. It worked and now the computer was booting into the XP login screen.
When I logged into my account I was presented with a nice blank desktop. Nothing was loading. Task Manager took about four minutes to appear. But after that I could run most programs, including Firefox. After some experimentation I ran Winamp and pressed play and that somehow triggered the loading of the desktop. So now I was in the desktop but I couldn’t run my firewall because it was one of the files was corrupt. My connection to the internet also kept terminating five minutes after I successfully access the ADSL account.
So I realised that Windows was screwed up again and went over to Suren’s house to borrow his copy of XP. (That reminds me, I’ve got to return it to him!) I deleted my primary partition to remove all traces of the old XP, recreated the partition and installed Windows.
The worst thing about a Windows reinstall, apart from the loss of all installed programs, is the amount of updates and software necessary to bring the computer to a usable state. It takes hours!
This are the things I installed right away:
1. Nod32
2. ZoneAlarm
3. Firefox 2 and Add-ons
4. GAIM
5. TuneUp Utilities
6. Free Download Manager
7. VLC Player
8. All motherboard drivers
9. TCP/IP Optimiser
10. uTorrent
11. JCreator
Not installed yet:
12. Paint.Net
13. Ad-Aware
14. CloneDVD2
15. Google Earth
16. Opera
17. Quicktime Player
18. Gtalk
19. FileZilla
20. Skype
21. Ventrilo
22. hamachi
23. Daemon Tools
24. Google Video Player
25. BS Player Pro
26. Adobe Photoshop CS2
27. OpenOffice
Thankfully, World of Warcraft worked without needing to be reinstalled.
Why the hell won’t Windows work for more than 6 months without getting one of it’s files corrupted like this?
He is your friend!!
February 18th, 2007 at 2:20 am
Dai ,You have pasted your notepad details that you usually prepare for the installation ! Mattamaana paiya
February 18th, 2007 at 5:25 am
lol… that’s rite dude. I too repartition/format all my drives and Install windows every 6 months.
Either the OS slows down everytime, or a file gets corrupt as you say.
Linux Rox ! If I had to reinstall linux, its only because I needed a change of Distro !
February 18th, 2007 at 8:32 am
If I didn’t need compatibility with all these games I’d switch to Linux right away.
February 18th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
What games, dude? WoW and Warcraft III should work fine.
February 18th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
more stuff that ought to be in your list:
winamp
limewire
devcpp/visual c++ (if you have to program in c/c++)
media player classic
limewire
nero
picassa
adobe reader
general windows utilities - winrar, winzip…
and why are you using jcreator when eclipse is around?
February 18th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Oh yeah Suren. I forgot to install all of those. However I don’t use Nero (too bloated) and Picasa (no use for it right now).
I don’t use WinRAR. I use PowerArchiver which looks more modern and works the same.
No Limewire for me, thanks. I use eMule. Forgot to install Winamp.
I didn’t know about Eclipse. I’ll try it out, but JCreator seems simple enough. I need simplicity.
Media Player Classic, I’ll install on demand.
February 18th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
And don’t tell me Dilbert was the inspiration behind the heading.
February 18th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
No way. Why would you think that?
February 19th, 2007 at 9:06 am
I see
February 19th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=yawr&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:46 pm
lol.. guess what.. It was YAWR for me today
A trojan opened Windows to all his girlfriends and all of them wreaked havoc !
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:32 pm
don’t you have nod32/zonealarm combo protecting your system?
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:50 pm
If you had that combo you’d be completely safe.
Until a Windows file gets corrupted, that is.
February 24th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Update your blog
wiyoats.
February 24th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
marc, files don’t spontaneously become corrupt, maybe that sector got corrupt on your hard disk.
February 24th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Windows files do get randomly corrupt, Suren.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Files get corrupt on many filesystems. Rebooting while something is being written to a file can cause problems and some filesystems have bugs that zero some files when a bad reboot occurs.