Just a short reinstall....

I started work at another place, while still having not left the last place. How does that work? Well the first place did not have enough work to keep me busy and the other place wanted a tiny platform drawn. Two days should have been more than enough. I brought my two year old computer with me and hooked it up to the printer server.

From here on , glue seemed to enter it's innards. The keeper of the server muttered things like: "free anti-virus no good, get external hard drive, don't do OS updates, don't involve yourself in any OS after Windows 2000". Needless to say the platform was no where near finished.

After two days of glue I decided to take to my computer on the Saturday and give it a good thrashing. In other words a C: drive reformat and reinstall of Vista, followed by reinstalling R2010 Autocad.

I arrived at 11.00am and left at 6pm. A day wasted and yet not wasted.
The first time waster was installing a new copy of Nortons: All it found after about 900,000 files, was a tracking cookie. Not that I would not do this again as I suspected a virus being the cause.

The second time waster was saving all the crap that I had collected onto my nice shiny new external hard drive. Funny how 60 MBits/sec looks just like 60MB/sec. It takes forever...

Ok now, lets see, (about 2pm now), how to reformat that hard drive? Just put the Vista disc in and do a restart?

Hmmm...that did not work. Half an hour later and after much hair removal, I happened to notice my motherboard documentation. Like the part that says "Press F2 while starting up to get your BIOS setup screen". Looks like the nice people who installed it originally, made the boot up order 1. Hard Drive, 2 CD Drive. Change this around and off we go.

Eventually, Vista is installed. In hind sight, this is where I should have decided to update the OS. As it happened, I decided to put the Autocad on, and at the same time I was doing that, I think the updates were being downloaded. This may have caused my problems when I installed the Autocad. It really struggled with .NET Framework, and after about an hour gave up and installed the other parts of Autocad.

Here is where I said to myself: "Ok it says .NET was not installed, but I'll try it anyway". It took about 2 minutes before it crashed. So this is where I downloaded .NET Framework from Microsoft and installed it as a separate item.

This appeared to work, and a much friskier Autocad appeared. Opening drawings still takes a little longer than it should, but this may be a network problem as the keeper of the network complained that he has had a lot of network errors, all only happening when I am attached....

At this stage I noticed the notice saying "Install your updates now". All 57 of them. Takes a while! (I had chosen the "install essential updates only")

I hope someone reading this can gain some ideas from the above if they find themselves in a similar situation.