Stupid browsers

Don't you just love it when your web browser crashes, losing everything you just wrote in a text box? I know I sure do...fucking IE.

Of course, I don't normally use IE. I've been a Mozilla man for ages now (since 1.0 I think). However, Mozilla has been crashing fairly randomly lately, along with a number of other programs. As I was also unhappy with how I had partitioned my hard drives, I figured that it was about time that I started anew with a fresh Windows 2000 install. This would force me to backup all the important stuff and also allow me to let go of all those things I had installed but never got around to using (VST plug-ins and various demos being the main culprits here).

It had been so long since I had had to install anything major in the way of system updates that I had forgotten just how fucking big Windows Service Packs are and just how dial-up unfriendly these monsters can be. SP4 required a 35 MB download that was going to take over 4 hours. I scrabbled around looking for some of my old PC World cover discs and found one that had SP3 on it. After installing that I figured that I would have saved myself a heap of time. Turns out I saved maybe an hour, if not less. The SP4 download had been reduced to 28 MB which would take 180 minutes to download. 20 minutes later and it still says it's going to take 180 minutes to download. Fucking service packs.

If anyone's got an easier way of doing this, I'd love to hear it.

-s