I’ve spent the past couple of days reinstalling both my laptop, and my wife’s laptop.  With that said, I Hate installing windows.  It’s horrible.  While I’ll be the first to admit the installation procedure has come a long way from from 20 some-odd 3.5 floppy discs, the installation time is still ridiculus.  Some things I have learned from this whole escapade is to have a backup of all the drivers from the manufacturer, write down your serial numbers and/or store them somewhere they won’t get lost/deleted and just because you have a compsci degree doesn’t mean you won’t forget to backup files on you laptop, and loose ~2 days of web work.

These are the approximate install times that I’ve had to deal with over the past days

• Windows – Failed twice after 45 minutes – Successfully installed after 90 minutes
• OSX – Clean install after 80 minutes
• Fedora 9 – Clean install after 30 minutes
• RHEL 5 – Clean install 15 minutes (@base)

I’m going to update my list of apps that I’ve found after redoing my mac sometime soon.