After years of abstinence, I actually loaded Windows XP Home on my Thinkpad. Reason really being I found my recovery disks from IBM, and figured that I might as well pop the Windows license back on it, so that I can experiment with this OS that’s oh-so-popular.
Man, Windows took the better part of the afternoon to get installed. If that’s not bad, it rebooted only like four times. Its funny how the whole install happens in FAT32, and then to make my life miserable, it converts it to NTFS on its final reboot. Why?
Installing all the updates, and getting up to Service Pack 2, took the remainder of the afternoon. One thing I’ve found interesting, and a must install is: Google Pack. For good protection from all those Windows virii, AVGFree seems to make the most sense. And OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is just out, and is the smallest download of all the OSes it would seem.
Then I reboot to find that Windows XP SP1 support ends on October 10th 2006. I believe there are some benefits to becoming genuine (or Microsoft is trying hard to sell me that). Its a good thing the upgrade to Service Pack 2 just takes time (in the form of a download) and is also completely free.
Now to figure out backups…