Here I am blogging from my laptop again.
Yesterday I formatted the disks and reinstalled XP and today, as soon I came back from work, I launched all the various updates, and while I'm writing this post the installation for Visual Studio 2005 is running.
Unfortunately the reinstallation didn't fix the problem I had with too much CPU in kernel time.

At this point I'm pretty sure it's an HW problem, probably the disk or the disk controller. I could buy a new 2.5" disk and hope it will fix the problem, but what if the problem lies somewhere else?

Since sending my 4 year old laptop to the Acer support will cost me more than its value, I made up my mind, so I'm going to buy a new laptop.

I already declared my love for the MacBook many times here and on my Italian blog, but I really want to be sure it will provide me the feature I want for the best price, so I'll be doing some search on the various shops in Wellington and online.

But knowing that it may take a few weeks before I find my new laptop, I'm building my machine with a Zen setup:

• Outlook because I've all my email in .pst files and I don't want to spend a minute converting them to Thunderbird format
• Visual Studio 2005 with all its updates and extensions (SP1, Ajax, Team Explorer, Mobile Emulator, and so on)
• SVN and CVS clients
• iTunes
• Windows Live Writer and a few plugins (actually I already installed it )
• MSN, GTalk, Skype
• Paint.NET
• FeedDemon
• UltraEdit

This is the minimum set of programs to stay in contact with friend in Italy, to write posts on my blogs, and going on with the development of Subtext and the other toy projects I'm working on.