Out comes my Knoppix 5 DVD, and into the machine I feed it. The local ntfs partition is mounted automagically. I mount my network samba share. Copy between the two… All my “stuff” which needs backing up before this machine can be memory wiped in a way that would make the creaters of the show Alias green with envy! Ok, so, not really… but still…

After that I’m gonna use the system restore to put the thing back together with some semblance of speed. And only then do I get to face the music: Hours and hours and hours of installing updates and software, and updates to software installed after updated to the system, and so on and so forth… and antivirus install, and antispyware install, and anti-windows install… or, I wish anyways.

And of course speed is “faster than as slow as it could be” because the bulk of the time is going to be spent in updates and copying my data back… the actual process of restoring the pc will be a minute amount of time compared to all of that…

And people wonder why I’ve switched to Mac OSX for my primary desktop!!