I’ve got the new hard drive now (a Western Digital) and I’ve decided to rebuild Windows XP on this machine (but not Linux – I’ll copy that partition over later).

So I spent quite a lot of last night installing XP, updating XP, getting security software up-to-date and wrestling with passwords until they worked.

I’m actually practising what I preach, and I’m no longer going to be running as administrator all the time on Windows (running as admin is one of the reasons why malware can be so damaging on Windows). Instead, I’ve got an admin account and my normal account and I’ll have to get used to ‘running as’ applications that are too stupid that they need admin privileges.

It is a real inconvienience in XP, but it’s generally a good practice to employ when using a Windows machine. Running as admin is like running as root on Linux all the time – I would never even think of being root all the time on Linux!
So, still quite a lot of software to go, I’m afraid, and things to configure, set up, wrestle with…