Jock Murphy Words and PicturesThe writing and photography of Jock Murphy

So I did an intersting excersize over the weekend. I reinstalled the os on my mac (on a new drive) and reinstalled xp on my laptop. I started both at the same time (10am Sunday) and then timed how long it took to format its partition install the os, and then install all available updates.

• The mac took about 40 minutes
• The pc took 5 hours

Oh and Windows activation failed for some unknown reason, so I had to activate over the phone. That was an interesting process. You have to read a 54 digit number to the system with no way to correct your answers. So if you screw up (as I did, damn this dyslexia), you get shunted off to a call center somewhere and have to repeat the whole exercise with a human.

If my XP restore CD had been Service Pack 2 instead of Service Pack 1, then I probably would have cut that time by about 2 hours. Still I have no earthly idea why it should take that long to install the OS and bring it up to date.