Man, who knew reformatting computer is such a pain?

[jzmtl]

So my computer has been bogged down throughout the years and I decided to reformat and reinstall everything. Well some great idea that turned out to be...

It's beeen 7 hours since I started, I've been sitting in front of it working none stop, and I'm not even 50% done yet. This does not even include all the back up and prep work I did over the previous week. This is even with two hard drives, so I can leave the first one alone and reinstall on second one, I can't even imagine what it's like if I only had one.

On the plus side, the computer seems to more lively than before, so I guess not all effort is wasted. 

[Freudian Frog]

It takes a looong time. Especially if you have programs with settings and all that...

My previous harddrive died, just replaced it this week. Took half a day to update and install and redo all my settings and everything.

[cliosguy]

i keep my computer ready to die, keeping just the latest stuff there so in case i need to start again is just a matter of 30 min

i dont trust in machines to be there always i live the the law of murphy

[jzmtl]

Well I'm finally done with windows and stuff, going to bed, leaving the programs to tomorrow.

Took me years to tune windows to my liking, gona take forever to get it back the way it was.   

[Whoey]

should have used the transfer tool to make a backup of old stuff, formatted, and then import settings etc...would have saved you a lot of work.

you'll probably notice a bit of speed difference...

[Neil]

I keep a ghost image of the machine on a separate drive, so when I have to rebuild I have a base that's only a few months out of date to work with.  Still takes an age though 

[Whoey]

it always takes ages... that's why something like SuseStudio.com is such a great idea... you can pretty much build your own ISO of the operating system with all the extra programs, configurations etc, then it's dirt easy to setup a new machine or format an old one! and you can always go back in an remove/add/change anything you like and rebuild the image... +1 for linux