It has been decided, my mind is set, this laptop must be formatted and given a fresh start. To reboot it now takes nearly 20 minutes, if I\'m lucky, with a further half an hour of tempermental disk activity and the remainder of my computing experience punctuated by moments (somethings minutes) of it \"thinking about things\". As the IT tech guy pointed out yesterday, it\'s a Pentium 4, you expect great things!

It\'s just such a pain getting everything backed up. I\'ve been sticking things on the linux box over night with a little help from rsync... but do I trust it? I\'ve had trouble with rsync mashing things up in the past which would be a huge pain. Also have you ever tried to backup a 30gb drive onto a 10gb one? It\'s prooving an interesting experience.

Not only do I have to think about documents though, there is all the email stuff, explorer favourites, the way I like my desktop, printer settings - including all the gumph I have to get printing working at work. Hopefully windows transfer will enable much to be saved but I don\'t want to do too complete a transfer that I just put all these problems straight back onto a fresh install. I hate sorting out pc\'s. Can you tell?

Yes it\'s nice to have a nice fresh computer to sit down to, the speed, the feeling that you\'re in control... but it takes months to get it feeling like \"home\" again and by that time it\'s probably just as stuffed up as it was when you started.

Roll on super-zippy computers, where processor power is unthought of, there\'s never a question of running out of RAM. Hard drives never get full and back themselves up without a thought from the user. Programs can be installed and uninstalled without effecting anything else and, most of all, roll on computers that start as soon as you switch them on, no booting necessary. Bliss