Back at 100%

If you've been reading my Twitter, you already know this, but...

After over 12 hours of work last night, I'm finally back up and running with Windows XP SP3.

There's still some things left to install, but all the stuff I use on a regular basis is set up and configured.

Everything I was able to do before I was an idiot and went "herp derp me install plop to MBR this can never go wrong" is back, for the most part.  I've made some tweaks and changes as well.

I don't exactly have my full Firefox extension set back up and running yet.  I'm kind of running an experiment to see if I can get by with less than what I had.  I had to rewrite my UI tweaks CSS for Stylish because I didn't have a copy of it anywhere else, but the YouTube tweaks, well, I just went to my own blog post on the subject and downloaded it from there.  Speaking of which, there's a small change I just had to make that I haven't uploaded yet, so expect that before long.

In the install/update process I did manage to finally get a copy of the standalone Windows XP SP3 installer, which sped things up greatly.  The fun thing is, that's the only way I can get to Windows Update from a fresh install with my Windows install disc.  Windows Update refuses to accept WinXP SP1, which is what my install disc installs.  Yeah, I know, I can slipstream it.  I probably should.  And I should see about slipstreaming all the updates too, to try and reduce how long it takes to play the Windows Update game.

One major change is that I installed Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, instead of AVG.  AVG and I have never gotten along well, it's always done nothing but report false positives.  Plus, AVG has a rather large install footprint and resource requirement, and craps itself all over your system installing browser toolbars and plugins and whatnot.  MSE is a lot simpler, a lot lighter, and just overall better.  And the best part: it's free to anyone that has a legit copy of Windows, which I happen to have.

I also changed my Foobar2000 interface around a bit.  Rather than doing separate playlists for each artist, I now just have all my music imported into its music library, and I slapped in the UI element that lets you browse through it and filter it and build a playlist from it.  This is one of the reasons I love Foobar2000, its interface is so modular.  Any time you want, you can go into layout editing mode and tweak things.  Even better, it has a scratchbox where you can play around with a new layout without having to change your existing one.  Then if you like what you end up with, it's simple to apply it.

In mIRC, I basically lost all my scripts.  I know I have a copy of one of them floating around somewhere, but it didn't show up quickly enough in a search of all my hard drives, so I just rewrote it.  I still have a couple more scripts to write (like my auto-identify script...) but overall it's back as well.

The final finishing touch that I added before going to bed was installing and configuring Winwall.  It's so sad that even though Winwall annoys me so much, it's pretty much the best wallpaper rotator available for Windows XP.  It could honestly do with having a much larger (or even resizable) interface.  It's just so cramped.

Anyway, I need food, so that's it for this post.  Hey, now that I have a computer connected to the internet, I can keep track of my Rogue Galaxy gameplay again, which means I can play the game again.  So much potential gameplay time lost due to having no OS...  Yeah, I could have done a session when I was running Ubuntu, but I spent approximately 99% of my time in Ubuntu either tweaking things, trying to get it to use a refresh rate other than 60Hz, or not using it because it would stop responding during periods of high disk access thanks to the fact that I was running it off of a hard drive in a USB2.0 enclosure.

Yeah.  Food.  Bye.

Edit: food's warming up on the stove (yay skillet meal), and I remembered that while I was installing Windows XP, I FC'd Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love in Guitar Hero: Van Halen.  I think this is my first FC of a song that contains a pattern that I have to tap.  The song has two slider note zigzags, and I'm bad at zigzags one-handed...