Format C:
Back in the old days, you’d type that command (FORMAT C:) to format your hard drive and delete everything on it. These days the procedure is a little different, but that’s exactly what I’m doing right now: I’m deleting everything on my laptop, while I type this on my desktop machine at work.
The goal is to be running Windows Vista RC2 (release candidate #2, just came out last Friday) by the end of the day today. I’ll also have the latest RTM build of Office 2007 installed, the latest Internet Explorer 7, and a bunch of other things.
It will be nice to start over with a clean slate, after all the beta versions and other crazy stuff I’ve installed on my laptop this year. And I decided if I don’t do it today, it won’t happen. I’m SO busy these days, with more international travel scheduled for November and December, so there won’t be any better time to do this the next few weeks. Now or never … I’ll post a comment to this thread from my laptop when it’s back up and running.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 11:19 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on October 9, 2006 at 11:35 am Mom wrote:
I am not sure what you used on your flight , doug, but I don´t think they had it in the coach class on the plane I flew from Sea-Tac to London on. They had small TV screens on the back of each seat, and I thought that was neat. I didn´t have to dodge other people’s heads to see the screen. There are so many new devices and things I don´t understand!
on October 9, 2006 at 1:31 pm Doug wrote:
Hey Mom, good to hear from you! Are you still in Spain? Feel free to share some details with us … or send me an email and I’ll post it as a guest-post or something.
on October 9, 2006 at 4:39 pm Doug wrote:
OK, I’ve had to do some crazy things to get access to my own blog, but I think I’m live now with Vista RC2 and Office 4518.1006. If I click “Submit Comment” and don’t get one of those pesky PRECONDITION FAILED errors, that will be a good sign.
Oh, and after figuring out how to set up FTP access, I think I managed to post a screehshot of my newly rebuilt laptop too.
on October 9, 2006 at 7:42 pm Tom wrote:
format c: was one of the first things that taught me that I need to pay attention. I did it once, hitting Y-enter willy-nilly while talking blithely to a friend (okay, a girl) I was trying to impress. I very efficiently overwrote everything on my drive while confidently talking about how there were so many simple ways to accidentally destroy your data, but all you really have to do is pay attention.
This person is not the person who is currently my wife. I learned my lesson.
I’ve been thinking about the disk-wipe thing lately, as everything is getting slower and slower. But all the product activation has me thinking twice - I’d rather be slow than spend two days talking to customer service around the world from various software companies about why I had to reload their stuff. It makes me blog angrily and carelessly, at the very least! ;p
Anyhow, let us all know if you met your goals - I’m interested to find out if it’s still possible to completely rebuild a machine in one day.
on October 10, 2006 at 9:56 am Doug wrote:
Well Tom, I’m there: up and running. I couldn’t get Vista to connect to the wireless at home last night, but that’s about the only configuration problem I have to work out right now. And I still have a few more programs to re-install, but so far I love it.
I posted a few more observations over on my work blog.
on October 11, 2006 at 9:03 pm Dave Fourputt wrote:
I’m showing my age but i also have fond memories of fdisk along with format c:
on October 12, 2006 at 1:48 pm Tom wrote:
Fond memories? I envy you. I have memories of corrupted disks and swapping stuff out with parts all over the place to replace a system drive and reformat. Case dust, little screws all over the place, driver disks (floppies, of course), Syquest disks with (hopefully) good backups and therefore SCSI ID hell, and so on. This kind of stuff only seemed to happen at 11:00 at night with a noon deadline the next day.