With all the hardware in place it was time to re-install Windows.  I did toy around with the idea of cloning the drive but due to the odd things happening with the laptop I quickly decided to do a fresh install.  With the drive already formatted in NTFS I went ahead and plopped in the Windows XP SP2 install disk and did a complete install.  The Samsung drive did show its speed, as did the RAM increase as the install only took 34 minutes overall to perform.  This was the easy part.

Next up came the device drivers for the Toshiba.  There were 21 files to install but it only took an hour thanks to all the restarts required.  After the divers were installed I upgraded to SP3 and applied the security hotfixes so I could connect to the internet securely.  With this done I went ahead and visited Windows Update several times to complete the missing hotfixes, IE8, Media Player 11, Windows Live, etc.  During these I made system restore points along the way, about 4, just in case something went wrong.  Then it was over to McAfee to re-install my AV suite so I could go out and get the latest tools and utilities I didn’t already download prior.

After most of the base things I wanted were installed it had taken about 6 hours thanks to restarts and configuring this and that setting.  I then installed MS Office and had to go back to the Windows Update site to get the latest SP and hotfixes, another hour.  At this point I attempted my first backup, and discovered my first problem.  My Matshita DVD-RAM UJ-841S drive could not write to discs anymore, keep failing, and it could not read burned discs anymore either!  Investigation found the Toshiba DVD-RAM software was causing a conflict, well I was not able to correct it, so I installed Roxio CD and DVD Easy Creator 9 (with Drag to Disk) and ended up uninstalling the Drag to Disk program because it was also conflicting with the drive.  Needless to say we again took a trip to Cyber City and got an IBM external DVD burner (my wife needed one anyway for her Asus Eee PC 1000).

.Able to burn files was good for getting backups burned as well as the utilities I have burned earlier this year.  After 2 days, and one long day on into the early morning, the system was fully Windows XP Pro with SP3, all device drivers and factory programs, all MS updates, McAfee, and Office as well as Adobe 6 Pro and just a few other programs (and one game so my wife and I could play a little Age of Empires 2 over the LAN in the evening) the system was ready to start the next stage.  I ran a through clean up, degraded the disc, created another restore point, the 5th, and did a Windows, System State, and Full system backup.  It had now been day 5 of the process and I had not even started to think about programs and my growing collection of USB external drives to do major housecleaning on.

So why did I go with a fresh XP install?  As I stated earlier the system had some odd issues.  It was really slow, despite trimming the startup folder, cleaning the registry, and tweaking this and that it was just too slow.  Next was the performance of some programs was just buggy to where some programs were crashing and hanging too much.  All of those problems were corrected and only 1 new one cropped up, the DVD-RAM drive function but the IBM drive is a viable work around.  Putting a new install of an OS, drivers, and programs onto a fresh drive is like moving your home.  You find a whole lot of junk you forgot about, throw away the old stuff that is broken or not needed anymore and it just works better.  I used to rebuild my systems every year when I lived in the states, that was a job because the lab I had was 3 main systems and a few test boxes.  I was not sure on the Windows authorization thing in China but it worked fine.  The time to do everything was longer mainly due to family commitments I didn’t have 4 years ago.  Still, despite the long hours and small frustrations the laptop is running MUCH faster, performing better, and ready to hold all the programs and media I have, next up… Getting it all loaded, configured, and housecleaning the USB drives and data into something more logical and less adhoc.