Just to prove my point about the KGW 11 o'clock news, I used a stopwatch to time the news-to-commercial ratio. It wasn't as bad as I thought: 22:20 of news to 12:40 of commercials. One third of the newscast is commercial advertisements.

The interesting thing, to me, is the way they have it laid out. The first 15 minutes has only one interruption. That means the last 20 minutes, which has weather, sports, and fluff, is more than 50% ads.

I'm going to start shutting it off at 11:20. I don't need to be pummeled with car ads.

I have a 17 gigabyte Seagate hard drive in my primary computer at work. When I installed it, that number seemed obscenely high; who in their right mind could ever fill 17 GB? Well, I answered that question last week.

I had just over 4 GB of free space left on the disk, when a client came in with a task that required the new Visual Studio .NET. I have avoided installing .NET up to this point, just because I knew I would waste time exploring all the cool stuff in the Common Language Runtime, but when a client knocks, you answer. To my horror, the release notes say that a full installation need 3.5 GB of disk space!

So, I popped off to Fry's this weekend and got an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" for $119. It has a 3-year warranty, it runs ATA-100 (my current disk is ATA-33), and it has an 8 MB buffer, which should make things go much faster. I came in Monday morning dreading the thought of Yet Another Brain Transplant, a task which Microsoft makes unnecessarily hard.

When I opened the drive, I discovered a floppy disk inside containing a set of utilities from Western Digital called "Data Lifeguard" that, among other things, includes a drive copy utility similar to Ghost that understands the NTFS format on my disk. Great, I thought; that's a lot easier than doing it the hard way!

Alas, here is the timeline for my misbegotten transplant adventure.

• 10:30 AM -- Shutdown, install disk, tweak jumpers.
• 11:00 AM -- Start WD tools and explore
• 11:15 AM -- Start disk copy
• 1:00 PM -- Disk copy hung at 96%: 10,444 of 10,855 MB copied
• 1:01 PM -- Swear a lot
• 1:10 PM -- Try it again
• 3:00 PM -- Hung again at 96%: 10,445 of 10,855 MB copied
• 3:01 PM -- Swear a lot more, use WD's name in vain
• 3:05 PM -- Remove old disk, make new disk the IDE "master", reboot
• 3:10 PM -- Install Windows 2000, tell it to format the partition
• 3:40 PM -- Format complete, start installing
• 4:00 PM -- Install complete
• 4:10 PM -- Start SECOND install of Win2K into a directory not called WINNT
• 4:40 PM -- Second install complete
• 4:41 PM -- Connect old hard disk in again, boot up new Win2K
• 4:45 PM -- Start recursive xcopy from old to new
• 6:40 PM -- Recursive xcopy complete
• 6:42 PM -- Use regedit to fix up drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping
• 6:45 PM -- Reboot into original Win2K on new disk -- SUCCESS

Now, it's true that I didn't run into any really difficult problems, and except for one stupidity on my part, I didn't lose any data. But if the WD utilities had worked, I could have been done in 2 hours instead of 9 hours.

And yes, the new drive is significantly faster: big programs, especially, load much quicker than before. Color me happy.

And why did I install TWO copies of Win2K on the empty disk? Well, the copy of Win2K on my old disk was in a directory called "\WINNT". In order to copy that to the new disk, I needed to be running Win2K on the NEW disk from a directory with some other name. Unfortunately, Win2K does not allow to you change the name of the system directory when installing to a fresh disk -- it always uses \WINNT. Thus, I had to install a second one (where you DO get a chance to give a new name), and delete the first.

The drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping is one that tripped me up before. In the Win2K registry, in \HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MountedDevices, Win2K keeps a list of the serial numbers of the disks mapped to the DOS drive letters. My old registry, of course, had the old disk listed as C:. If I hadn't changed that, when I rebooted on the new disk, C: would STILL map to the old disk, and the new disk would get assigned something bigger (turned out to be G:). The system would still boot from the new disk (now called G:), but any programs that referred to C: would go to the old disk.