Time passes and even computers get old. My Windows is nothing to talk about…

After I started using the Mac, the PC was handed over to other users in the house. The party began with cheerful underwater themes, 3D fish, and weird things like that.

Unfortunately, a computer doesn’t get better with time… and it got ugly even to turn on. I’m taking advantage of sacrificing my installation and starting another from scratch. But that’s not so simple.

My computer is a bomb made by Acer, so there’s no Windows XP installation disk… only the backup disk that I had to burn myself. Okay.

Another thing are annoying software that we buy and mess up our computer. I’m already imagining here the hassle of reinstalling Delphi (original, that’s why it’s a pain) and the thousands of games my son plays (also original, just those that ask for the CD in the drive!).

I’ll take advantage to do a general system backup. I bought a 500GB external hard drive at the supermarket, €69… a Maxtor Basic. I started the backup and discovered why it’s called Basic… because of its speed. Then I looked closer and saw that I had marked only 76 GB for the little backup. I’m using NTI Backup that Acer gave me!

Since I don’t trust Windows, I’ll also make a complete image of the system. I found out that NTI doesn’t do disk images, that’s another product and it doesn’t come free with the computer.

Visiting thefreecountry, I found the list of free software that makes disk images… but what really matters is Maxtor’s, the MaxBlast. As the external hard drive is from them, I decided to use the program. If you don’t have a Maxtor HD, Acronis True Image (MaxBlast for those who are not Maxtor clients) is almost as expensive as the external hard drive… worth buying the drive for the software :-D

But what really caught my attention was an article on how to create a Windows XP boot disk, written for those lucky people like me who bought computers from “brand”. The article is well detailed, explaining what to do with that i386 directory in your computer.

The adventure is not over yet, after all, backup is never fast and reinstalling even less so.