Reinstalling Vista

Well, I finally got what I perceive to be "enough" time to go through and back up all of the data from the ThinkPad R61i, and reformat the thing to get a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate. Everything was getting slow and quite disorganized, so I figured I'd go ahead and get everything cleared out and set back up. Mainly, I want to be ready for my trip this summer where everything will need to be fast.

Another big concern was that I've been somewhat irresponsible in the management of my Vista system so far -- I wasn't sure for a very long time of exactly which software I wanted on the machine, so I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling a bunch of different pieces of software several times. That, a few mistakes with some developer tools, and the upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate kind of caused things to become disorganized in the system. My intent after this reformat is to keep everything going well not only for the summer, but for Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 as well.

Maybe it's a bit of a far-fetched goal, but for this install of Vista to last until Fall 2009 would be pretty great. I've had Mac OS X installs last that long, so my presumption is that if I do it right this time around, I can have the setup last quite awhile.

Another thing I'm doing to try to increase the longevity of the install is to actually keep up with a backup regiment. In the next week or so after I find and install all of my favorite utilities, my intent is to make a master backup onto DVDs that I can fall back upon if necessary. In addition, I'm going to be doing a complete PC backup on a weekly basis.

For software, I'm going to go with Outlook for mail, and I'm going to try to find a Calendar connector for the Oracle Calendar setup. For productivity software beyond Office, I can't think of anything I really need aside from the Adobe Creative Suite, which I'd like to buy for the Windows machine at some point. (Although until then, I'll just do Photoshop CS3 on it's own, because getting all of them is quite bothersome.) I'll probably grab XChat and Pidgin, and a few other little utilities like the VNC client and whatnot will fall into place over time.

So here's to keeping my Windows system running better!