Well, I finally had to do it. I made the mistake of not doing a fresh install when I first got my Toshiba M200, but a year later I finally got around to it. Toshiba, like most computer manufacturers, installs a ton of useless utilities and applications that just end up slowing everything down. I uninstalled most of them, but there were some I couldn't get rid of. (failed uninstalls and such) Then there was Service Pack 2, after installing that I seemed to have even more issues… I have always found that installing service packs over existing installs leads to alot more issues then installing service packs with the OS install. (not sure if there is a technical explanation for this or not) I was having more and more Windows issues, weird startup problems, and all around general sluggishness of the OS.
So I decided to do a clean install even though I knew it would take forever and that I would forget to move something (haven’t figured out what it is yet). The problem was that Toshiba only includes a “system restore” CD, which is only XP SP1 and also includes all the crappy applications and utilities that were part of the problem in the first place. I tried using the Windows XP Tablet Edition SP2 from my MSDN CDs, but my key would not work and I had read of people having problems trying to do that. That is where TabletPCBuzz came to the rescue, this forum post details how to create a new XP CD and to “slipstream” SP2 into the install. The process required some files from my current install, so I did a restore from the restore CD, copied the files over, then made the custom install CD using a very cool .NET application called nLite. In the end I got exactly what I wanted: a fresh install with SP2 and without any of the annoying Toshiba stuff.
I just love having a fresh install, maybe this time around I will do a better job of organizing my programs and documents… (I say that every time)
-James
Read: Ah, nothing like the feeling of a fresh re-installed computer
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