I hate windows. I really really really hate Windows.

My monitor finally gave up the ghost today. Completely gone. The top half folded in to a line across the middle of the screen, and then the bottom half decided to join it. Now monitor go bye bye.

It was old anyway. Had to set the gamma to like 2.75 just to be able to see the screen, and it couldn’t display reds properly at all. They just showed up as almost black. Was starting to wear thin anyway. Old monitors I guess.

So now I’m back using the old 17″ Compaq MV700 monitor. Good monitors, just feels very weird looking at a screen that suddenly seems so small. Very much not used to it and its going to take a while to get used to again I suspect.

So I put that new hard drive in my machine. 200gigs of sweet sweet space… At least thats what I was thinking. Reality is rather different unfortunately. See, my copy of Windows XP is an old OEM version. Its the original. No SP1, no SP2. Problem is, before SP2 Windows XP didn’t support any drive bigger than 130gig. :-( So I was forced to create a 130gig partition and dispaired that I’d never see the other 70gig. But the weird part was, the BIOS saw it without a problem, and Ubuntu LiveCD saw it without a problem. I was really getting a little annoyed.

Talking to Stuart tonight on Google Talk (if you don’t have it, you’re missing out) he informed me that SP2 finally allowed Windows to support bigger discs. So off to the Disk Management MMC snap-in I go and what do you know. Theres my missing, unformatted/unpartitioned space.

I started rebuilding Windows at about 3 in the afternoon on Monday. Its now just after midnight and I’m still installing updates. I haven’t even gotten round to installing the apps I’d use. Windows, Firefox, Google Talk, AVG and thats really it. Of course, the first non-essential app to get installed is World of Warcraft. ;-) Thats currently 45% of the way through updating to the latest 1.9.0.2 patch. ;-) So its not installed yet in my view. ;-) Still updating. ;-)

My biggest problem at the moment is that it took me from the middle of the afternoon until after 10pm tonight to get Windows itself installed and updated to a point where I can use it. I haven’t even gotten all the drivers for things like the TV, Webcam, bluetooth adapter, 5.1 surround sound installed yet. Nor have I even gotten other essentials like the various Media Players and codecs, anti-spyware and so on. OpenOffice.org isn’t installed yet.

And that isn’t even beginning to contemplate getting the data off the other drive yet. I’m a million miles away from that point.

That means no music yet either. No iTunes, no podcasts. I’m not even going to consider ripping my CDs again when they’re still on the other hard drive.

Still, the upshot of all this is that I will at least have a 200gig drive that shouldn’t die on me any time soon. The old drive was getting ready to die on me, so at least now I can breathe a little easier. All the truly important stuff is on DVD anyway. ;-)

Unfortunately, its going to take a long time to get everything set up and running properly again. Lots and lots of stuff that needs to be recovered. I will also be taking the old drive and dedicating it fully to Linux. So I’ll have a 200gig Windows setup and a 100g Linux setup. Fairs fair. Linux software is generally smaller, and I don’t run most games in Linux anyway ;-) Games are massive now days. So it kinda makes things even for both I figure. ;-)

Still, production is now at an all time low because the machine is just no where near ready to do its job. Soon though. Once windows is installed and running properly, things will start to get a LOT better on the production front.

Then its back to coding. Promise. I really need to reduce how much I play GW and WoW at the moment. They’re kinda getting out of hand.