So, Dell guy (actually Unisys guy) did show up with the new hard drive today. He basically took one look at me and said “Here, I think you can put this in without me” and left. Admittedly, I could do it–it’s a Lego operation; my Mom could do it–but I thought it was kind of funny.
And then, miracle of miracle, I popped in the system restore disk, the computer booted into the restore environment, connected to the network, formatted the new drive, and restored itself from the image I made on Friday
Of course when that was all done the machine wouldn’t boot, and I had to boot from an old XP install CD, drop into the repair console, and do the fixboot/fixmbr thing, but once I had done that the computer was back with everything in place–SO much easier than a fresh install. I still don’t believe it all worked, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to somehow drop.
So, I’m pretty happy with Norton at the moment.
On the other hand, I’m wondering if it isn’t a bit of an enabler.
I mean, a Microsoft based system builds up a lot of cruft over time, and this was always a kind of self-healing thing, in that it was more or less inevitable that eventually something would break and you’d have to do a clean reinstall. You never wanted to do that, but you just had to do it sometimes, and in the end, after the pain, you were always happier.
But with imaging tech, you can dodge some of those bullets. And so the “lifetime” of a particular machine setup gets longer. And with MS OSes that means “cruftier”. Ghost is enabling us to put off the purifying cleanse and purge, and to wallow longer in our crapulence.
I, of course, am wallowing with intent, so that’s OK.
