Friday night I figured I would rebuild my dog-slow IBM ThinkPad from scratch to see if I couldn’t get a little life back into it (it’s been pretty solidly running on the same OS install for about 2 years). Some of the things I learned:

– The T23, Windows XP, and any Wi-Fi card do not mix well together.

– Formatting a partition takes freakin’ forever. (Formatting it 3 different times takes 3 times forever.)

– Whatever’s on your MusicMatch playlist gets marked as “in use” pretty much forever. Something keeps reading through the My Music directory, constantly modifying its contents. Even after uninstalling MusicMatch and disabling Windows Media Player.

– A lot of that cute stuff that works via special keys on the notebook suddenly stops working when you wipe the drive. The recovery partition doesn’t work if you don’t have the software to access it.

– IBM tends to shut down its support website on Saturday night for maintenance.

– Blaster attacks are still coming on strong. Every 1-10 seconds, depending. What a pain in the ass.

Argh. Well, I’m happy now… 40 hours later.