Internet hell

I am starting to suffer big time from cacky internet connections. For some reason Gmail is running appallingly slowly, and it hasn’t been possible to check my emails all day. It is only a beta, I guess, and of course it might be a problem on the office server. Annoying, though.

I’m suffering a bit at home as well, last night Matthew was trying to access the internet to do a bit of research for his RE homework and it just didn’t want to play ball. We are on AOL at home, largely because it is easy for him and my gf to use, though it is a pain as I have to be in Windows to use the broadband – from linux I have to use dial-up.

I am thinking about wiping my PC and starting again, as it is pretty slow on all counts. It’s just the thought of copying all my files across onto CDs is too much to bear… but it will be worth it. I have installed and uninstalled so much on the Windows side that the whole thing must be clogged, and despite having AntiVir, a firewall and Spyware monitoring software installed and running, I am not convinced that something nasty isn’t at work somewhere.

By running the system restore CD, I could simply install SP2, AOL 9, some drivers, Dreamweaver, MS Office, OpenOffice.org, Webstyle and some games and I would be done. Then just install Linux in a small partition for my use, and leave it at that. But where am I going to find the time?!