Window cleaning

Today I have been mostly pacing around waiting for things to finish installing, so I can install something else.
I’m sure it’s been close to five years since I originally installed XP on this box and it’s been wearing me down lately, having done everything I could to smarten it up, it was just tired. So first thing this morning I backed up my funderbird mail, firefox settings, ftp settings and deleted the entire partition. Huzzah!
I have pretty much everything else on a separate drive anyway so it’s only the OS cruft that needed nuking from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure?).

I have managed to get my list of installed apps down to a bare minimum, over the last few years my development routine has been whittled down to a couple of Adobe apps and a copy of Notepad++. My start menu used to span three columns (and this is at 1856×1392), now it’s a third of the screen height and I have everything I need on here. I was thoroughly pleased to discover that WAR didn’t need the registry to survive, I didn’t fancy having to repatch that beast. At the moment I’m waiting for The Witcher to finish patching itself back up to the enhanced edition, and this time I swear I’m going to get past chapter two before being distracted by something shiny.

I didn’t bother to back up all my Steam apps, I haven’t played HL2 or its episodes for a good while, audiosurf was a passing fancy and SiN Episodes was nowhere near as charming as it’s Q2 engine powered parent. I’m probably going to regrab TF2 tonight though, I be on dat kryptonite, straight up on dat kryptonite!

Testing out this site theme until I can pull my finger out and create one of my very own, don’t hold your breath though, I have stuff to kill.