Bitrot and wasted time

My work provides me with various computers. One of them is a decent recent vintage laptop. The corporate IS geeks are always a few years behind in what they'll support so until last Friday the laptop was running Windows 2000 Professional. But it was suffering from a serious case of bitrot. One particular thing was that the Microsoft XML parser was busted. This left me unable to do a number of things I needed to do. Like file expenses for one. And being an aging geek I never would remember that I couldn't do these things until I did them and got weird failures. Then I'd remember, say a few unprintable words, and move over to a different computer to do them.

So the annoyance level of that stuff finally overcame the dread of starting from scratch. After a multiple hour long transfer of the 40-some gigabytes of "My Documents" off to another system I sent the laptop off to IS for a wipe and re-image. Forty minutes later it's back. No big deal, right. [snort] Right.

Now I'm several business days on down the road and I'm still tripping over things that needed customizing, applications I had to reinstall, and fixes to be applied.

It's an enormous and annoying waste of my time!