Be it the operating system (Winblows) or hard disk failure (they're not built to last forever), I invariably have to reinstall Windows XP about once a year. In this case, a combination of crappy spyware/viruses lately with the unruly Norton Anti-Virus (that ish messed with my computer bad) and a bad hard drive killed my computer after I recently agreed to install a bunch of fixes from Windows Update. How ironic.

After the compulsory reboot, the computer never came back online, stuck at a black screen with something about the system folder being bad or missing. It's sad that I didn't even blink at the fact that I had to reinstall the OS, it happens that often. After going through the motions, XP actually found all these corrupt files (recovering lost child nodes) and I lost the drive that contained my iTunes library and my pictures, 30 GB give or take. That is despite having the OS on a different partition (I reserve 10 to 15 GB for the ever growing OS and Program Files). Sucks, good thing I backup my stuff with CopyTo but it currently does not have automatic scheduling

It didn't take too long to get the computer up and running, being able to download most of my apps from the net. Here's in order installed

- Firefox, remains my favorite browser
- AIM, all my friends use AIM
- Graphics drivers for my crappy ATI Radeon card in order to support dual monitor (why ATI has that stuff over https is beyond me)
- Irfan View, fast image viewer, also does batch resizing/renaming
- Google Desktop, although I question the wisdom of this decision
- Ad-Aware, it only found some data mining stuff
- iTunes, got to test the latest iTunes 5 which is not half bad

Words of advice: "back it up, often"