I had recovered a computer not used in years. Eventually I managed to get XP to repair it and it worked fine for a few days and I could access old programs, in particular Sophocles 2003. However there was a persistent and annoying software fault which no amount of searching online seemed to find a fix for. I have Sophocles 2007, and the registry settings to ensure I don't lose access to that program now the company has disappeared from the world, so the 2003 version is a little surplus to requirements. There wasn't anything else of worth on that computer so there was no reason not to do a full re install. So I took the plunge and just did a full clean reinstall of Windows XP. I took a back-up of the drivers first using Driver Genius Pro 2005 and copied a lot of other things to the portable USB drive before commencing on the clean re install.
It all went fine. Done in under an hour, activated and loading speedily. I restored the drivers, installed a couple of programs and then we went down the path of getting the OS up to date with patches and updates.
When I started Windows took up 2.6 Gig of the hard disk. When I finished all the updates (which again took the best part of six hours) the space used was up to 9.1 gigabytes.
Fair enough, this was a full update, skipping no patches or upgrades. A couple failed and I didn't update the graphics card driver (I did this first time round when the computer was 'repaired' and the graphics went haywire) but this is still a lot of hard disk space to relinquish.
Many megabytes of bandwidth and a threefold increase in space, and it's taking a lot longer to load up. Was it worth it? I ask myself.
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