It Lives!

I spent part of my night last night reformatting and reinstalling the laptop at home. I took Windows XP Home off the laptop due to it running less-than-stellar, and I replaced it with Windows 2003 Server. No real reason for picking that OS over anything else -- I just figured I'd give it a shot to see how it went.

The reformat went fine. 40 GB hdd, so it took its sweet ass time formatting the drive for NTFS. The install of 2003 went pretty smooth as well. Of course, it didn't auto install my wireless (or hardline) ethernet and a few other onboard things, but those weren't too hard to update. I ended up using the Mac for the first time in a while so I could get my wireless drivers, etc. Burned those onto a CD and away I went!

The one thing that struck me as funny about the install was the screen resolution. 2003 decided to give me 800x600 resolution (even though it did have my video drivers installed just fine), but instead of it being 800x600 and taking up the wholes screen with a very pixelated look, it was an 800x600 viewable area in the center of the screen (so there was a large, black space around all sides of the viewable area). It was weird. Turning the resolution to 1600x1200 (what I normally am at) made everything look fine though, so it's all good.

After getting the OS and internet up and running, I patched the OS. Because you can't let Windows run for more than 30 seconds unpatched or you're going to have a steaming pile of rubble for a computer. Patch patch patch. La la la. Done.

Then I installed .NET Enterprise Architect again. I figured I'd give it one last shot. Glad I did -- it's running fine and is zippy to boot. The only thing I can think of that causes it to go weird is the OS. Geoff, William and I were all running XP Home when we installed .NET EA and all of us had major lag issues with it.

I'm waiting for my .NET book to come via FedEx today so I can start learning about this shiny new thing. I'm sure I'll babble to everyone here about my thoughts on it as a language, as an IDE and ask all sorts of silly questions. Aren't you just excited now? ;-)

Start to finish on the reformat and reinstall + install of patches & .NET (and nothing else): started at 11:00pm (after dropping Pixel off at Elissa's for my vacation which starts tomorrow afternoon!!) and finished at 2:30am. Not too bad considering it was a clean wipe on the hdd and an OS + IDE install.