Welcome to a New Year! Time of joy, happiness, and windows reinstalling!
I use a Samsung X10 at home, a slim and light laptop that packs in a lot of processing power. As any other Windows XP user, there comes a time every couple of years to reinstall Windows and get rid of all the crap that is slowing down your system.
In my case, the deciding factor was that Skype stopped working after a Google Talk failed install, so it was time to start fresh. One would expect that in the so-called “digital world” we live in reinstalling Windows would be an easy thing, but it does end up taking most of a rainy NY Sunday afternoon.
For anyone considering giving their hard drive a fresh start to the year here are few tips learnt from this experience. I believe this list will be particularly useful if you have lost or damaged your original installation disks:
1. Write down all the programs you have currently installed in the computer (you will be amazed of the amount of random software you accumulate!)
Bootdisk.com for $3 paid via Paypal and a working version of Windows XP using a BitTorrent program like utorrent
Note that by using bittorrent I am not promoting illegal use of software, but just providing an alternative way for rightful windows users with scratched disks to get everything to work again.
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Hope this helps. If you have any other tips do leave me a comment!
You might also find this article and this second one useful.

For the last 10 years I have been part of the digital media revolution as a