Well, after f-disking this computer late last year, I swore that I was going to take good care of it and not have to do it again for at least three more annums.  Then, Leeanne got a mini netbook for Mom's Day, (because the other pc was incredibly slow) and there we were with a pc that was looking at not getting used.  I had an 80gb disk in both pcs, a 250gb disk in the workhorse, and a 160gb in the dud.

I don't know how he figured out to turn the dud computer off, but the boy is getting faster and faster at shutting it down, so I decided to move both large disks to the working computer and bring all our music and movies with it, so there I am, formatting and installing windows again, which is kinda the point of the story.  At least it went more smoothly this time.  Here is some advice from what I learned.

-check for all your installation disks NOW.  Put them away somewhere they won't be broken, damaged, or lost.
-verify that all your hardware has a driver somewhere on a disk that you can access if you need to re-install windows
-verify that you have a backup of all your favorite software, whether or not it needs a serial number/license, and what that might be

Last time I did the install, I made sure to collect all my programs/drivers that weren't on my installation disks, and save them to a special folder on my second hard disk.  That really saved me a lot of time this go-round.  Last installation took just over three days.  This one took about 4-5 hours, and most of that was waiting on the computer and playing Sudoku on my Zune.