Some of you know that I have no hesitation to re-format my system and install whatever version of OS that I influenced by at the time.  Well, this time I really took the opportunity to re-build my laptop from the ground up.

The opportunity was created by some hardware purchases, a RAM upgrade to 4GB and a 250GB USB HDD.  I was running out of space and wanted to get rid of the original dual partitions that were configured at the factory.  The laptop (Acer Aspire 5610) came with two 70GB partitions on it’s 160GB HDD – and I hate having to split things up.

So with the new external, I backed it all up, wiped the disk, created the new partition and installed Vista Ultimate back on the clean machine.  No Acer software, no other "value adds" that end up causing problems.  And finally got a change to take a snapshot of the cleanest Vista install I’ve done to date.

So, I’ve now spent the last 30+ hours rebuilding all the additional software and tools that make up my "kit" for what I do, and there is still probably 10 hours of configuration work left.  Yes, I have a lot of software, tools, utilities, tools, VMs, tunes, scripts, and such that takes a lot of time to configure.

The best part, for what I do, is that I have over 120GB free just for Virtual Machines which I use for a substantial amount of testing and proof-of-concept.  Along with the extra memory, I just became much more productive in this area.

Anyway, this is the kind of IT geeky stuff I find interesting.  Later!