Okay, perhaps everything isn’t so rosy. After using the system for a period of time, it’s obvious that there’s all sorts of broken going on. Looks like I’ll have to re-format and re-install Windows. I really don’t want to, and it’s a huge inconvenience but it’s for the best.
It had been a good long while since the last re-installation. Despite Windows’ reputation, Windows XP Home has actually proven to be incredibly stable for me. Considering the amount of gaming I do, as well as system intensive tasks such as 2D/3D CG and some video editing, that’s surprising. However, over that period of time, I think my system has become bloated.
I had been considering buying a terabyte drive in order to consolidate work and media files and move one of my logical drives over to its own hard drive. While that would help, it’s still only a small step forward and doesn’t drastically improve the overall situation.
A full system re-installation will enable me to significantly trim the fat from application installations and reduce the number of logical drives from 6 to just 3. It’ll improve system usability as things will be much easier to find, and it’ll improve system performance since each drive will contain just a single partition each.
Windows will get its own hard drive all to itself. Applications and games will go on a separate hard drive as well. The third hard drive will be the terabyte drive and will be used for work, personal and media file storage.
Optionally, I can keep a fourth hard drive solely for the Windows page file, which should result in less drive grinding overall during memory intensive tasks.
I’ll need to make sure I’ve got all my work and personal files backed-up, all my software installers and registration information (serial numbers, license codes/files (etc)) and have all the basic system drivers and set-up installation files/discs prepared.
This will take a considerable amount of preparation time in order to make the re-installation as smooth as possible. I just hope my PC holds together long enough to see me through the preparation stage.
Ah, the joys of owning a PC. 
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Tereabyte drive… That would be nice…
I hate reinstalling the OS. Not really for the reinstall but for the multi-gigabyte downloads of service packs. What a pain.
Yeah, totally hate re-installing the OS. I have a long list of applications, both large and small, that I use and collecting everything together (installation files, licenses etc) for one big re-installation session is a pain in the ass.
My email proxy set-up is also complex since I have to get Spambayes, email anti-virus and Web-mail-to-POP3 clients to play nicely together. Getting it to work correctly the first time was difficult enough. Not looking forward to doing it again.
I wouldn’t really need the terabyte drive if it wasn’t for anime, and the storage space gobbling 3D assets for Poser and Daz Studio. Additionally, working with uncompressed video for my animation activities requires vast amounts of drive space too.
I just have to keep reminding myself that it’s short term pain, for long term gain. Better hard drive arrangement and the extra storage should help with performance and productivity.
I’ll just make sure to invest in some drive imaging software so I can create a drive image of the “clean” set-up to make recovery less of a chore.