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I had the bright idea to reformat mine and my wife’s computer this weekend.  I confidently told her that it would only take me 4-5 hours once I got started - “I’ve done this plenty of times dear.”  I even started around 6pm on a Friday Night (Dec. 30) thinking I’d be easily done by midnight…  Needless to say, it was 4am when I finally gave up the ghost.  What happened to 4 hour reformats?  Them days are gone (unless you do a lot of pre-planning).
I started with the basics:

1. Gather your OS (Windows XP) and Driver CD’s (Dell)
2. Write down all programs that you use (and where to get them)
3. Document your email account info
4. Backup Files

Ah, the necessary backups… This was my first major miscalculation.  Gone are the days when a backup could fit on a CD (much less, a floppy if you go back even further).  It took me 7 CD’s to backup my wife’s Music, Pictures, and Files!  My PC, which I consider very light-weight, took 2 CD’s to backup.  The backups alone took me almost 3 hours!

Once I completed the backup, I was ready for the thrilling fun of wiping the machines with their original Window’s disks.  Amazingly, this process was over with in about 1 hour!  I thought I was home free!!!!  Oh how wrong I was…

Once my machines were back up, I had to insert the Dell Inspiron 600m Driver CD and begin the painful process of installing each driver manually.  Nevermind the fact that the Resource CD recognized my computer and told me exactly what to install… for some reason it couldn’t be nice enough to just install them all for me.  So, for the next 1-2 hours I continued installing drivers one by one.  Total time so far, 6 hours (I had to take a few breaks for food, etc.)

At midnight, I start the next phase - Windows Update!  Over… and Over… and Over… I continue to download Critical Updates, Service Packs, Updated Drivers, Software Enhancements, Blah Blah Blah.  Similar to the Resource CD - it won’t let me just choose everything at one time!  After I get all of the updates done, I start copying the backup data back to our machines.  This takes a while too… Chalk up another 2.5 hours.  So now its close to 3A.M. and I still don’t have any of our applications installed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I spend the next hour downloading the simple apps like iTunes, GAIM & Trillian (me / her), and other miscellaneous items.  Restoring those backup files ate up the rest of my final hour before I gave up.  Needless to say, I was wiped out the next day and disgruntled as I spent another 2 hours finalizing settings, apps, etc.

Gone are the Good ‘Ole Days of a ‘Quick Reformat’.  Welcome to the new world of computing - more files to back up, more applications to install, more OS Updates.  Sheesh…