The Cost of Reinstalling Windows: Conclusion

It's Monday afternoon and my laptop is finally up and running. Total bandwidth used: 898.21MB downloaded, 32.57MB uploaded. Allowing 100MB for mistaken downloads, and we are looking at 800MB. At R99 per GB, that's around R80. Thank goodness I wasn't using a 56kbps modem. It would have been a lot more if I hadn't kept copies of most of the programs I have downloaded.
Then there is the time cost: nearly an entire week of productivity lost. That's around $1100 or R8000, about the cost of a new laptop. Fortunately I had backups, and the opportunity to make copies of all my data files before doing the reinstall. Other people haven't been that lucky.
I haven't been entirely unscathed: I didn't know that the faxes sent were not stored in my own user profile, so I lost those. I also didn't know that I should convert from FAT to NTFS only once all the files had been installed. This would have saved a lot of time trying to defrag the Master File Table (MFT) which got defragmented during the installation process. It took Diskeeper to fix it, much to my surprise.
I also lost all my IE and Firefox bookmarks. This is probably a good thing since they were hopelessly jumbled anyway. From now on I'll blog (in draft) anything that looks useful. I had also held out on upgrading from Firefox 1.5 to 2, but this catastrophe has proved quite useful, and I like the new Firefox a lot. It's amazing that I rely on NOD32 to protect me from myself so much. I'm glad it's up to the job.