Yesterday in the middle of compiling some code my computer blue-screened.  Subsequent attempts to start it up kept giving "Unmountable boot drive", the hard drive had bit the bullet.  Luckily I back things up to an external drive semi-regularly.  I went to a friend's work where he builds PCs and got a laptop hard drive.  He also had an adapter so that I could hook my crashed HD up to a regular PC's IDE chain and sure enough I could get most of my data off of it and burned onto a DVD so I didn't even need to go to my backups.

If anyone knows a quick way to get the contents of My Documents off of an NTFS drive let me know.

Due to some funky display driver problems I spent 6 hours last night:

1. Install windows xp
2. get display drivers working
3. Windows update
4. service pack 2
5. more windows update
6. Office
7. Office update
8. ActiveSync
9. Messengers, etc.

Today, I had to stop by the office to get MSDN discs for:

1. Visual studio
2. MSDN
3. Source Safe
4. eMbedded C++4
5. Visio
6. Sql Server

... and on and on and on.  Despite having a halfway decent laptop I estimate it will be a total of 12 hours of installation easy.  Despite the various advances in hardware and software technology in recent years a couple of things are still sorely missed:

• Can we get these things to boot up faster?
• Can we get the install time for a complete development environment below 12 hours?

Visual Studio is 50% done, I'm going to go read something.