The December Ritual...

December marks the time for my yearly ritual known as "re-install Windows." Why, you ask, do I have to reinstall my operating system every year? The answer, if you will calm down for a moment and let me finish, is simple. Remember that new fancy computer your built? Remember how blazing fast it was for the first hour? OK, now think of all the programs you've installed and uninstalled, all the registry changes, the millions of temporary files that have come and gone, the hundreds of pieces of spyware you downloaded and purged, the gigabytes of files you've moved around, fragmenting your hard drive to bits, and the various installations that have failed, leaving a trace memory of themselves in the form of "random crashes". These things destroy that poor computer.

Sure, like the rest of you, I do my best (in the beginning) to maintain my computer. A regiment of defragging, anti-virus, file organization, anti-spyware, firewalls and the like stave off problems for a few days. A week in, however, you notice that your WOW fps has dropped from 60 to 58...then to 52...then 47....then 26...then 11. The reason for this is simple:

• The Windows internal defrag tool works by moving your files around in an orderly pattern. It then randomly deletes 15 entries from your file partition and replaces them with viruses..."just for funs."
• Press ctrl+alt+del and you will notice that "system idle" is eating up a ton of your processer time. While some might lead you to believe this is because the computer is doing nothing and thus there is "idle" time, in truth I believe this is an app that is constantly running a countdown which informs Windows to permanently suck up 1% of your processor time every 3 days. This means that on day 1 your 2Gigaherz processor is running at 2Gigaherz, and by day 300 it is running at 0 Gigaherz. This cannot be recovered until Windows is re-installed.
• Upon every bootup, windows inserts 4 programs, randomly selected from it's internal "most inefficient code ever written" database, and permanently adds them to your startup files.
• Upon startup, windows executes the following block of code:

if (userLogin == LoginNameForAuthorOfJabroniReport) setWindowsSpeed = UltraSlow;

I ran a time test of Photoshop on my current dual-core machine (yes, just a dual core), versus my control machine, a Commodore 64 with the 1541 floppy drive. It turns out, in terms of image editing, it is faster for me to program a C64 version of Photoshop, from scratch, on a platform that is physically incapable of running Photoshop, then run the progam off of 10s of thousands of disks than it is for me to boot the program on my Windows machine.

The process of a fresh OS install takes me weeks. I have to comb half a dozen hard drives to find the "good" files, back them up, then double check to make sure I didn't lose something vital. I then need to find and document all the programs I own...many of which I don't even remember needing until it is that ONE time a year I need it (hello FlashFXP). Then I have to format and install Windows. Then the process of installing all my programs, some of which, such as Visual Studio, will literally take until next December to finish installing. Finally, I need to setup all my shares to work with Xbox Media Center...which I'm convinced is a process that can only be achieved by using a combination of luck, skill, and a form of Caribbean Voodooism that hasn't been practiced since Colonial times.

Let the fun begin!