Reinstallation

Last night, I reinstalled Vista on my laptop from a new disc.

I had been having problems with my previous installation for a while. For one, I somehow got the Windows search utility to not index the hard drive, which made searching for anything a pain. I installed Google Desktop to alleviate that, but that came with another whole sidebar of gadgetry (widgetry? Someone should tell Microsoft that they wouldn’t be ripping off Apple just by calling them “widgets”—they’re the new big thing). That was something else I’d let get out of hand: the “dirtiness” of the installation. I would save random stuff on the desktop, install software that I ended up uninstalling five minutes later, etc. There were a whole lot of files scattered around that weren’t needed. Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t like that (it’s the same way with my music library: everything has to have a correct ID3 tag) but it had to go.

The final straw, which I discovered a few months ago, was that HP had my laptop in some sort of grasp. I had bought Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance on Black Friday and was trying to play it. It barely played: even with all the graphics settings on low it was still a slideshow, which is odd because my computer passed the recommended requirements according to System Requirements Lab. A friend suggested I update my drivers, which I tried to do through nVidia’s website. After trying a bunch of different drivers, I eventually got a message something to the effect of your computer vendor requires that you download drivers from their site. From this I deduced that HP has some sort of software installed that prevents you from installing third-party drivers. Which was great, except that when I went to HP’s site, the drivers weren’t up-to-date, meaning no SupCom.

It’s been about twelve hours since I finished the installation and I’ve been slowly repopulating my computer with drivers and software. I have Firefox, Pidgin and Winamp, but not yet SupCom. There’s a whole list of stuff to get before it: Thunderbird, the entire Adobe CS3, tablet drivers… Eventually I’ll update my drivers and install SupCom. It should work this time.