PERSONAL: First the good news…

Well, it’s great to be back. The last few weeks of ‘increased productivity’ J have been due to my notebook’s premature death.

Not to worry, Magic Dave (Talman’s IT guru) got me all back up and running and in the process loaded Vista on my machine (the machine required a complete reformat and install).

And on the weekend I finally got around to reinstalling FeedDemon and restoring all my backups. Fortunately I had a complete backup of my hard drive from a week before the crash, so I am pretty much back to where I was before. And after updating all my feeds I see I have over 2500 new posts to get through (and even better, many of them are from some of my favourite authors – as opposed to the general feeds of journals and mags). Happy days.

The great thing about a complete reinstall is that it forces you to think carefully about what you do and don’t need.

This time around I’m embracing the Virtual PC approach, whereby only the barest minimum is installed on my machine and everything else runs in a VPC. So, the only things installed are:

Vista Business, Office 2007, Expression Web, FeedDemon, Picasa, Adobe Reader, ALZip, IE7pro, Virtual PC 2007 and TextPad.

That’s it. I’ve even elected not to install Flash plug-in (I kid you not).

Everything else will be running in a VPC. I’m planning VPCs for Visual FoxPro, Visual Studio, all my accounting stuff (QuickBooks etc), SharePoint and even a separate VPC for running Flash stuff (I’m actually not sure how long this will last – but I figure it will stop me just flicking over to YouTube on an impulse, given that I’ll have to run a VPC to do so…).

There have been a few little gotchas along the way as I’ve got going – I’ll itemise these in other posts.

Oh, and regarding Vista. I love it. I’ve held off installing it for months now, but after being ‘forced’ to make the change I am really glad I did.

Great to be back with ya.