XP + IT Professional = OS X

For at least 6 months my mantra has been, "Gotta get a Mac, gotta get a Mac, gotta get a Mac". Whenever I visit the Apple store at Oxford Circus, I am always impressed by the speed at which the Mac can work. My old XP computer seems more that a little old hat in comparison.

Two weeks ago, my computer got so slow that I decided to install Windows onto a separate hard drive. If you have never tried it, let me tell you that it will make your computer incredibly fast. This is the kind of performance that most people experience when they buy a new computer. Over a few months of usage XP gets slower, but only very gradually. The change is so slow that most people don't realise it, that is until one day when the computer performs so badly that it is obvious that something is wrong. This is a very normal experience of Windows, I don't know anyone who hasn't experienced this.

A solution to this is to reformat your hard drive and install all your software from scratch. That is what I did and got my computer working like lightning. The trouble is that it takes forever to individually install all those bits of software. Using a disk cloning program, all of the software can be installed with one click and a fraction of the time. That's the easy part, but what most people don't tell you is that you have to organise your computer in a specific way to make this work.

Disk cloning effectively turns the clock back on your computer; making any partition exactly the way it was when you backed it up.