Day II

Replaced monitor with 2001fp that surprisingly arrived early

Hooked up cable feed to wintv card and did autoscan of channels

Installed external DVD burner

Installed DVD backup software

Reboot

Activated windows since my 60 day MSDN grace period suddenly expired after 1 day

Installed Photoshop CS

Connected external HD that contains all data files

HD stops transferring to main HD.  Move around to different USB port.  Loose ability to see drive at all.  Crap.

Starting over again.  Really glad I wasted that activation earlier.

Formatting

Installing Windows XP RTM this time

Told windows messenger to never run

VIA Ethernet driver from CD

Reboot

Configured windows

Made sure I could see my external HD and copy files

Installed VIA USB 2.0 Driver from CD

Reboot

Copied files again, way faster

VIA 4-in-1 from CD

Saw a dialog box that had the title "you should not see me" briefly

Reboot

RAID Controller from CD

Reboot

Windows XP SP2 from CD

Reboot

Windows update

Reboot

Windows update

Reboot

Radeon drivers from CD

Reboot

Optimized DivX player from radeon CD

Moebius strip screensaver from radeon CD

Reboot

Soundblaster drivers from web

Reboot

WinTV drivers from web

Reboot

Wintv2000 from web

Scan for channels

Installed Photoshop CS

Installed Photoshop Album 2.0 (which included acrobat reader 6.0 without asking)

Reboot

Open Photoshop Album.  Had to reconnect all missing files since the source drive letter for my data drive has changed, and photoshop album stores absolute paths.  After roughly 10% of my photo collection, Album crashes.  Restarting Album yields better results on the second attempt