Going, Going, Gone.

In a follow-up to my previous post about upgrading from Vista to XP.

I got home quite late last night after attending Josephine's Presentation Night -- she won the Teacher's Choice award for her class -- so I was in a great mood. I thought I'd continue on by getting started with cleaning up my computer.

I began the task by uninstalling just about everything I could on the computer. I wanted to get it's footprint down small enough that I could just copy the whole disk across to my USB portable disk, and then deal with copying the data back later. I also ran up a few crucial programs and backed up the data where I could - E-Record being the really imporant one. After a number of hours, I managed to get it down to about 40Gb and started to copy across to my USB disk. I had already at this point started to copy the Users directory from drive C: to spare space on (internal) drive E:. To be sure, to be sure...

40Gb seems rather large for a Windows installation, Vista or not. I hunted through the files and removed all the obvious things (an Oracle Vista iso disk image?), and discovered that Alison's iPod software is not content with merely reading the MP3 files off the E: drive, it also has to copy them into her home directory as well into some other format. Hmmmm.

To do the copy I used this great little no-install utility called Unstoppable Copier. It just powers through everything, blat, blat, blat. Superb. I left the copying at 3am (!!) to get some sleep, figuring that it could work on it's own for a little while.

And all copied this morning. Before leaving for work I reformatted the partition and started the XP installation. I ran out of time and will get back to it this evening.

Seems I am not alone in my use of the term "upgrading" when going from from Vista to XP. See here and here for just the tip of the iceberg. Nor does my choice of title seem to be unique.