Getting my PC back

Wow, I did not realize what a pain it was going to be to get my PC up and running again. Fortunately I was able to borrow my buddies external hard drive for storing my restore file, and get a copy of XP Professional from another buddy. So on Tuesday night I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled XP. After that I had all of my files back on the PC, and it was off to setting up the DSL connection.

In the morning Leslie started installing some applications (del.icio.us, acrobat reader, etc.). When I got home I installed Trillian, iPod Software, iTunes, Poker Stars (should have been first), and all of the Windows Updates (this took forever and 4 or 5 reboots). This time I made sure I installed Service Pack 2 on my machine. I think if I would have had the Personal Firewall installed on my machine beforehand, I wouldn't have had to go through this.

My buddy from work is supposed to be cutting me copies of Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, and SQL Server 2000 and 2005. Oh yeah, and Doobie has Office XP on the hard drive, so I'll have to install that as well. Hopefully I will get all of this done by tomorrow because I have a new project I am going to start, and would like to get some work done this weekend. It's a pretty small project, and they couldn't match my quote ($300 under it), but I am going to take it anyway. I have a feeling these guys will be throwing more work my way in the future (at least that's what they say).