Week 4: Clear

I just recently reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7. I was moving from the Release Candidate/Beta build to the Professional Edition. The beta goes inactive in March, and this class had that MSDN E-Academy deal for 23$ dollars for the Professional Edition. I hope I can use my UFL email to get cheap software forever!

Usually, after installing I'd have to go spending hours to retrieve and re-install all of the programs I had on the computer before that. Thanks to web 2.0, and other modern software improvements I was back to normal in less than 10 minutes after Windows finished updating!

I used Ninite.com to automatically find, download, and install my music player (Zune), my web browser (Chrome), my utility programs (Spybot, CCleaner, uTorrent, Flash, FoxIt Reader, and WinRar), and also Steam. Steam is sort of like Ninite for PC Games. When I login to my account, it knows all the games I've bought, and I can download them from their servers and play them within the hour. Chrome also allows you to login wherever you are and get your bookmarks, and I have an addon that also collects my usernames and passwords wherever I am as well for it.

I might reinstall it more often just to keep things clean when it becomes this easy to be up and running again in no time.