Just as Vertex mentioned, it is much, much easier to do a fresh Windows install and move over documents than it is to clean up an existing one. Apparently Dell puts (or put, this is an old machine, but I wouldn’t expect this to have changed) RAM that is slower than what the motherboard can take as a cost-saving measure. This things really flies now, and it POSTs so fast that I have trouble getting to BIOS or the boot device menu in time.
That being said, I am once again appalled by the out-of-the-box driver support in a fresh Windows install, even that provided by an SP3 CD. The device manager was no help for finding out the names of the sound, video, and ethernet drivers I needed, so I booted up into Damn Small Linux and did an lspci, which told me what I needed to know. Searching for drivers based on chipset versioning is not too fun, but it worked. The graphics were greatly improved from the 4-bit color, very low resolution they started out in, which was nice. The ethernet driver was a bit harder, because when I downloaded it, it wasn’t an installer, just a series of folders with three files. I went to the add hardware wizard, but it turned out I needed to let it fail, get past the check Windows Update pane, and then it would let me tell it where to look. The operating system seemed too proud of itself when it completed.
I had trouble finding an audio driver, and so did Windows even with a Windows update connection. I was very pleased to find that Dell had the audio drivers, which they made easy to find and download. Adobe annoyed me when I installed Acrobat Reader, as my client requested, because it decided to place another shortcut on the desktop that I didn’t ask for, and I feel it tricked me into installing Adobe AIR. The shortcut then wouldn’t go away – I couldn’t delete it – so I ended up booting into System Rescue CD to get rid of it because it annoyed me so much. I couldn’t delete it even running as administrator.
The whole thing ended up taking somewhere around 7 hours, but closer to 4 or so of those were actual work, lots of it was waiting for a virus scan. I wonder what I can do in the future while waiting for progress bars. I did start installing XP while I waited. I’ve also moved to a different method of charging for my labor. When I was working on friends’ gaming rigs, I just charged 10% of the hardware costs, which seemed reasonable. Dad suggested I charge hourly. I have a cap, though, as to not let labor prices get too high. I feel uncomfortable charging large amounts of money.