Re-installing Vista

Today I looked to see how much an upgrade to Windows 7 was, and the cheapest was about £60-80, so too expensive to make it worth the upgrade from Vista.

My Vista installation has become quite buggy, with not allowing me to move, copy or delete certain folders using Windows Explorer, and also Windows Explorer would crash if I right clicked on said folder. I was coming across this problem reasonably often, and was having to use the command prompt to move, copy or delete the folders, which is quite a bit slower than using windows explorer.

So since Windows 7 was too expensive considering it offers little advantage over Vista (from what I've read it's less resource hungry, faster at some tasks, and slower at others), I decided to just re-install Vista.

Before I did this I backed up all the important stuff, (which took ages), then while I went out for an afternoon walk I left Vista to install itself (after formatting the partition where it was installed).

On my walk, I just went up Lubenham hill to try and get a photo of the snowy path going down the hill and the sunset. Unfortunately, as I was leaving the house, I could see a large bank of cloud was blowing towards the sun. I thought I might as well go out anyway, as the sun might find some holes in the cloud and send dwn some nice beams, or the cloud might blow over and get lit up underneath by the sun.

Unfortunately, neither of those things happened, so I just waited on top of the hill for quite a while seeing if anything was going to happen, until I eventually decided to cut my losses and come back home.

In the evening I installed the drivers for the PC, and then some updates for Vista, which took ages. To install Adobe CS4, I needed Vista SP1 installed. Weirdly, the Windows Update didn't show this as an available update (it only had IE8), so I had to manually download the installation package from the Microsoft website.

While all the installing and downloading was going on I watched a couple of films with Mauser - The Battle of Algiers (which was really good) and Ballad of a Soldier (which was quite good).

The weather was sunny all day (until sunset). I the evening it snowed lightly for about 30 minutes.

Food
Breakfast: Tangerine marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese with Italian style salad sandwich; 2x tangerines; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x posh sausages; mashed potato; baked beans. Pudding was 2x hot mice pies with spleenvap. Coffee.