After much nagging I got around to re-installing Windows XP on Charlie’s computer today. It was my fault for giving him the idea really: I was getting very frustrated with his PC being so slow. Every time he wanted help with something I could not believe how long it took just to start up and close down and do everything inbetween and I was blaming him for having so much junk on it.

He has the habit of just saying yes whenever the PC asks him if he wants to download something, so the machine was stuffed full of extra toolbars, Google desktop, Picasa and loads of other stuff – 18 months’ worth of him saying yes to every website. I said it would be easier to just reformat the drive and reinstall XP than to try and tidy it all up. From that point he decided he must have the OS reinstalled.

In the end I put a new hard drive in it and installed XP onto that. If I cocked up I could at least put the original drive back. It made sense as he only had a 40Gb drive in there and all his games fill that up pretty quickly and a 250Gb drive doesn’t cost a lot now. At the same time I put another 512Mb of RAM in it. The RAM on its own would have speeded it all up a lot, but he was fixated on having a clean install.

So I installed XP, got the wireless networking set up again, downloaded anti-virus and firefox, configured his e-mail and now it all goes like shit off a shovel. The only slight problem is that I somehow ended up with the hard drive being drive E: and there is no easy way to change the drive letter of the system drive. It would be better if it was C: but changing it involves lots of registry tweaking. My own fault really, I left his external USB drive plugged in when I installed XP and I think that confused everything.

My only regret is that the hardware upgrades were an impulse so I had to get them at PC World instead of a cheaper online option. That shop irritates me. Half the stuff in there has no price on it. Sometimes there is a price on the shelf but it turns out to be for something else.