It's been a while, hasn't it?

It's been a while since my last post - roughly six months.

That's because I've had no shortage of work to keep me busy. Before I go to sleep tonight, I thought I've have a little rant, though :)

My laptop died in February, and I ended up buying a Dell XPS M1530. Love it, apart from Dell's slowness in providing a BIOS with proper virtualisation support. A new bios released a week or two ago fixed that, thankfully.

The laptop came with Vista, which I dutifully wiped, installing Fedora and more recently Ubuntu, under Vmware. Vista (being 32 bit in my case) worked under VMware prior to the BIOS update, but 64 bit Linux didn't.

Prior to this laptop, I used Windows 98 to run Libronix in a 5GB virtual disk. So when I installed Vista, I thought 10GB should be plenty. It wasn't long, though, before it started complaining about running out of disk space. "What?", I thought. I'd only installed Libronix and OpenOffice. Even with a couple of gigabytes of books, I shouldn't be running out of space! So I cleaned up and so on, but to no avail. Thankfully VMware lets you resize virtual disks quite easily. 15GB was soon set aside.

Time passed. Tonight I thought. "Hmmm. I suppose I'd better install those Windows Updates". Silly me. But before I knew it, I was low on disk space again. Apparently Windows expects a minimum of 15GB, and prompty chews most of that for c:\windows. In my case, c:\windows is taking 10GB of space. I could find that the side by side (sxs I think it's called) directory is chewing about half of that. I couldn't account for the other 5GB, even after telling Windows to show hidden files and so on.

Can you safely delete the 5GB in the sxs directory? "No way, Jose!" say a host of websites I Googled. Isn't that crazy though? What in the world is Windows doing, needing 5GB for what are supposedly legacy DLLs and such like. Where did all these legacy DLLs even come from?

So, now M$ has sucked 20GB of space for something that used to take 5GB, and I still can't get SP1 to successfully install. Apparently the mysterious error message code means there's not enough storage. Gosh. There's 5.37GB free (and falling)...