Talk About Software Bloat.......

The laptop computer was beginning to have performance issues (lots of slowness and weird screen resolution issues) so I decided it was time for a rebuild from scratch to clean up the accumulated mess.

The laptop is about three years old and had one hard drive failure/replacement under warranty in the past.

It is running MS Vista Home Premium and there the story, trial and tribulations, not to mention lots of waiting time while stuff installs begins.

So far after 3 days of rebuilding, in which it has been constantly downloading, and installing, Vista updates, the amount of hard drive space being taken up by Vista, its updates, and a limited installation of MS Office 2007 (Word, PowerPoint and Excel, with no Access, Outlook or OneNote) is 51 GB!

Oh, and we're not done yet as it just began installing Vista Service Pack 2.

The Hard Drive is 102 GB.

So 50% of the total space on the hard drive is taken up by just the operating system it came with and was designed for, and the basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that were contemporary with its release.

On the upside, in between multiple restarts for Vista updates, I've re-added the Dell printer driver and it actually connected on the first try, which was impressive, not to mention a full anti-virus suite. I also removed both MS Works and the trial MS Office install that was on it which was interfering with the purchased copy of MS Office - the software license key for the full Office 2007 Ultimate edition that was purchased wouldn't work with the trial (and unlockable for full functionality with a license key) Office 2007 Home and Student version that was installed and the install kept failing so long as the locked trial version was on the system. Lots of fun.

With luck the reinstall will be finished tonight and we'll have our laptop back in use again.