So, for the past few days you may have noticed that my online activity has dropped dramatically compared to what most people would call “normal”. Well, there are a couple of reasons for that, but the one I’m going to be explaining today is probably the one none of you would care about – the new hard drive on my computer (and related crap).

My laptop has been upgraded quite a bit from the bog-standard, college-provided, college-locked, college-restricted etc. thing. First big change was the obvious removal of all the college pre-installed tools I’d never use, and all the protocols that were on it, such as Novell login (why on earth would I ever need that). Once I had “liberated” my machine from that, it was onto adding more RAM to make it somewhat usable (from a single pathetic gig to three). And now the latest change is to add a brand-new hard drive to it.

If you are wondering why I’d felt the need to upgrade the hard drive, it’s really because the one that came with it was a paltry 60GB that ran at 5400rpm. And also the way it was partitioned, it had 40GB for the system, programs and everything – and only 20GB for all the Documents and Settings. Which was shite given how much crap I tend to have. At one point I had about 15GB free on the system drive, and was rapidly running out of room on the data drive. De-partitioning wasn’t an option as that would have required a complete wipe…

That’s where my external hard drive came in. I started using it to install space-heavy things such as some games, my HD video source files, and other things I generally didn’t use all that much. It worked fine, except for some reason my computer suddenly stopped utilising USB2.0 speeds for it, making it much slower to use, and more of a pain than a benefit.

Which is where my new internal hard drive comes in. A new WD Scorpio Black Edition 320GB 7200rpm from Komplett to be precise. I now have both plenty of space and speed to enjoy using. Being a brand-new hard drive though, meant that everything I wanted to be on it had to be thrown on from scratch. Enter the Windows 7 RC.

Now getting Win 7 onto the drive was a pain in itself, but to get to the point, I eventually managed to hack a USB stick I had to be bootable, then put the mounted Win 7 iso files onto it and booted into the installer. Plain sailing from there, and now my computer is essentially brand new with a new drive and OS to play with.

What was this (very messy desktop, I know…)

Is now this (still a way to go, a few more programs to re-download!)

Unfortunately, one side-effect of this means I have to re-subscribe to all the feeds I had before, since I’m using IE8/Windows Live Mail to deal with feeds. I only wish the Windows Live Toolbar could also sync my feed with SkyDrive as well as my favourites… So if it looks as if I haven’t been paying much attention to your site recently, just gimme a little nudge and I’ll get you back into my feeds list