ufh logo Upgrades from Hell : Windows 98

I had an idea that I'd spend saturday rebuilding my machine, using my new 20GB drive as my C drive, and installing Windows 98 on it.

Then I frittered Saturday away by playing Deus Ex, and watching a lot of TV.

Sunday came around, and I had a great sleep. When I finally got up (it was too hot!) I thought 'gee, I could now do that rebuild', I thought about the processes involved, and it's too depressing:

  1. Run SCANDISK on my existing drives (t e d i o u s) (50-100 minutes)
  2. Shutdown and Turn off the computer (3 minutes)
  3. Hook up new drive, finding something (usually boxes that software comes in) to 'rest' the drive on, because there is no room in the computer case for the drive to sit! Making sure that the drive is in IDE SLAVE mode. (10 minutes)
  4. Turn on computer, reconfigure hard drive information in the BIOS (4 minutes)
  5. Boot up, and have 75% of my system be out of whack, due to the new drive positioning itself over the 'top' of my real 'D' drive. This isn't really important, because I won't be using the computer; but it means I won't be able to access email, news, or IRC, so the long hours ahead will be spent in silence. (5 minutes)
  6. Erase the old copy of my C drive on the new drive (I'll prolly just reformat the partition), then copy the C drive across. Another tedious process that can take upwards of an hour for 4Gigabytes of data. (60-90 minutes)
  7. Dump the registry out in text format (regedit->export->myoldregistry) onto the new disk. (5 minutes)
  8. copy Windows 98 install files to new drive under 'win98' directory (10 minutes)
  9. Shutdown and turn off computer. (3 minutes)
  10. remove power *AND* ide cable from old C drive. (1 minute)
  11. change new drive to be IDE MASTER. (2 minutes)
  12. Turn on computer and reconfigure hard drive information in the BIOS (4 minutes)
  13. Boot up from Win98 floppy with CD support. (4 minutes)
  14. Run Setup from the Win98 directory (60-70 minutes)
  15. sit in front of computer and answer boring stupid questions for about an hour, including:
    country, time, and date information, usually at least twice.
    all the accessories I want loaded ('everything')
    network settings (involves at least two reboots)
    load drivers for sound card, and for video card and for monitor
  16. Eventually, have a basic Windows 98 system with a bunch of icons on the screen that I do NOT want (MSN, I.E. Channels, etc.)
  17. Start the ennui-inducing process of installing old software, recreating registry information and/or reinstalling from ZIP files or CDROM. Find at least 30 programs for which I don't have the latest version hanging around on my 'downloads' directory, and for which I've forgotten the username/password/key/code/whatever required to get the damn thing to install. Every second program will require Yet Another System Reboot. (three hours)
  18. Start fixing up all my games so that they work -- some of them will require a reinstall, and resurrection of registry keys. (endless)

At the end of about five+ hours of effort, have a computer that is 2/3rds as functional as what I started with, and look forward to weeks/months/years of tripping over old pieces of software that no longer work because of registry conflicts/non-information, or they don't like their new drive location, or whatever.

During the process I will have to take breaks to do stuff like feed the cats, make dinner, go to the toilet, answer the phone, answer the phone again, and watch some movie on TV whilst eating dinner. Of course, the timing will be execrable, just as I'm about to finish one thing on the computer, something will come up in the kitchen; I'll probably burn the dinner, or myself, and get really aggro and grumpy.

What will all this effort achieve?

#) A system that boots significantly quicker.

#) A system that has a less bloated registry.

#) About 10GBytes of extra disk space to play with.

#) An even more instilled hatred of the entire process.

#) A computer that doesn't behave as I expect it to, due to lost    functionality/programs/resources/whatever.

Sigh.

Not today. I wore myself out just thinking about it.

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