I've been meaning to clean my laptop off and start over for awhile now (last build was April 2005) ... and now I know why I kept putting it off ... it takes FREAKING FOREVER to repave!.

I'm now on day 2 of reinstalling software. Friday night, I reformatted and installed win 2k3. Saturday, I spent all morning updating Win2k3 and fighting with the drivers for my wireless card. In the afternoon I spent most of it installing and updating and then updating and then updating the office applications. Yesterday evening I finally started installing development tools - first sql server 2k and all of its updates, then visual studio 2003 (this alone took at least 2 hours), the windows updates ... which seem to take more time the more software you get on the machine. The last thing I installed last night was Sql Server 2005 Standard (which took at least 2 hours) ... I didn't realize I had the developer version until this morning ... but there is too few differences for me to take the time to back off the standard version right now.

This morning has been windows updates and sql server 2005 sp1 ... soon I'll get to visual studio 2005 which will give me a big enough window of time to go to the gym and workout.

The thing is - I would like to start playing around with more beta software ... but at the moment I am thinking there is NO WAY I'm going to put beta stuff on this machine any time soon. Now that I have 2G ram I can start using a vpc or virtual server for some beta stuff ... not on the main machine ... tooooooo painful to repave.