Windows Calculator shouldn’t take seven seconds to load. Certainly not on a ThinkPad T30 with a Pentium 4 2GHz!
I’ve TweakUI‘ed and Cachman‘ed, Ad-aware‘d and X-Setupped, plus fiddled with virtual memory. I cleaned out the system tray, Registry and Startup for pesky TSRs. No dice. What could it possibly be??
I loaded up Disk Defragmenter and hit Analyze. File Fragmentation: 47%!
How could this be? This is a brand new laptop. And then it hit me. The laptop wasn’t installed from the ground up, but given the standard disk image by corporate IT. This is the same image the smarties in IT are giving to every laptop user in the company. Great.
(There’s an extra story of waste here: all ThinkPads come with Windows XP Home plus license preinstalled. When we get them, we format them and replace them with an image containing Windows 2000 Pro, also licensed. No wonder Microsoft is so rich.)