Flutterby™! : XP faster!

For a while now, my Windows XP Professional box has had boot times in the quarter of an hour range. Recently I've started actually using it for work, and it's been amazingly sluggish. I've been through the process table and the registry with a fine toothed comb, both by hand and with several spyware and virus checkers, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and come up empty handed. The one thing that nagged at me was that the hard disk I was using had occasionally given me trouble on some machines, but it seemed like this one was a combination IDE controller and drive that worked.

However, it finally got annoying enough that I decided to take the plunge and replace the only remaining thing that I could imagine might be the problem. So I used the outrageously priced (but on the shelf today, and if they come through with rebates less outrageously priced) Norton Ghost to transfer to a new 160 gig drive.

Damn. Now I'll no longer scream "don't you dare!" when people talk about trying to make Linux boot times like Windows XP boot times. It's now actually a usable system. Hot freakin' dawg!