As a geek, I use my laptop extensively. It's with a huge amount of forethought that I decided my laptop had really had a hell of a thrashing over the last three and a half years. In that time, I've not once reinstalled the operating system (Windows XP Pro), instead carefully considering what was going to be installed and how it'd affect other things running on there. In that time, it's had a lot of abuse, having things such as QuarkXpress, VB .Net, Photoshop and many other intensive applications and suites installed, all of which have left their mark. So I decided to start again. A week on and things are pretty much back to usual. I took the important things out of documents and settings - my offline e-mails and so on, and took the plunge. I've not installed any of the software I don't regularly use (which did find me installing Powerpoint about 2 minutes before a training session was due to begin...) Other than that, the laptop does seem a lot happier, and it's a lot nicer to work on at the moment. I've pretty much got all of my sessions put back onto SecureCRT as well.

Last week we met up with the photographer (after our original photographer dropped us due to there being a number of pro-am photographers also in attendance). Nice lass, who's got a lot of good ideas. Looking forward to working with her as she's open to suggestion on what we want to do.

I went to Leicester on Friday night, primarily to sort some bits out hanging over from the IP regrade but actually ended up in the pub with Steve which was incredibly useful in having a sound off about all of the wedding guff. The people sorting our suits out phoned me today so that's one other thing ticked off the list as well.

We've been looking around at new cars recently after the revelation that we're spending about £250 a month on petrol for the Saab. We're paying huge consideration to a BMW 320d compact, which seems to return about 50mpg compared to the 25-28ish on the Saab at the moment. With the mileage I'm covering at the moment, it's a bit of a no brainer.

In other news, Formula 1 season starts this weekend. Yay :)