Reminder to self: never eat dogfood just before heading home, it'll keep you up all night.

The "dogfood" in this case is release candidate 1 of the upcoming XP Service Pack 2. We're not recommending that customers use it in production environments, but I've been wanting to try out the Tablet PC enhancements. And since it's being rolled out across Microsoft in the upcoming weeks, I figured that I'd beat the rush and grab the bits sooner rather than later.

Now, I didn't explicitly time it, but by looking back through the chat logs of my whining, I can see that it took 40 minutes to install onto a fully up-to-date Toshiba Portege 3500 over our internal LAN. The good news is that includes backing up all previous state, so its easy to revert back if anything goes wrong. The bad news is it then took another 37 minutes to download hotfixes, reboot, and finally defrag the disk - and the vast majority of that was defragging.

I needn't have hung around that long, because I use Diskeeper from Executive Software, which happily defragments whenever my screen saver kicks in. But by this point I was curious about the relative times for download, install, and defrag, so when I got home I started the same process on my Dell desktop to provide a point of comparison. This time it took 2 hours 34 minutes to install over megabit DSL, including hotfixes. The wizard didn't start up until 2 hours and 1 minute into the download, so it looks like "however long it takes to download plus half an hour to install" is a safe bet for a mid-range machine. Diskeeper then undid the damage in 8 minutes, so I guess the other lesson of the day is "desktop disk drives are still much faster than those in laptops".

If you want to add some of Diskeeper's boot-time defragmentation capabilities to Windows for free, try PageDefrag from sysinternals.com. Their winternals.com alter-egos will also sell you Defrag Manager.

Ok, curiosity satisfied, I can now go to sleep…