Yesterday morning I got my new XPS M1730.   I spent the next 6 hours loading Visual Studio, MSDN, add-ons for Visual Studio and other software.  Then using HijackThis! I went and removed all the crap Dell puts in at start up - why the heck do they do that anyway?   I mean there's nothing worse than getting a brand new machine with a 2.5 Duo/4GB or RAM/7600 RPM drive take forever to boot up because Dell has to wrap 'Network Connection' in their own GUI (which is less user friendly than the Windows one), their own 'Power' and 'Display' GUI (again, worse than Windows) and just other needless pointless crap.   As a programmer I can say that they definitely are doing some gold-plating there! I digress though...basically in the end I spent about 5 hours getting *my* stuff installed and tweaking the install from the factory.   Doing all this I missed the initial 'back-up' time frame on WHS, but something told me at the end of the night to go ahead and do a manual back-up instead of waiting until tomorrow afternoon when it would automatically be backed up.   Dell comes with a free year of 'data back-up' but why bother when you have WHS - another item removed from start up by HijackThis! (man I still love that tool after all these years!)

So this morning I was adding all the updates for Windows and Office.  After reboot I got the good old BSOD...figures.  Tried safe mode - BSOD...that's bad.  Tried again to make sure.  Yup - she's a gonner.

In the past I'd be cursing up storm, having a major coronary, and in short just be really miserable (and the world would know it - believe me).  But, I have WHS - not just a simple data back up, not a manually ghosting program.  So I pop-in the restore CD, hard-wire into the GB router and 9 minutes later, full system restore to where I was last night.   Sweet!  Sure the heck beats going through the Dell disc restore PIA and then another 6 hours getting the system back to what it was.

This is 2nd time WHS has saved my rear!  So to all you haters out there who think Redmond and Microsoft are evil - suck it!