Lately I've been getting the feeling that maybe my machine really does need a rebuild. I'm the kind of person who rarely reboots, let alone reinstalls Windows. I try to take good care of my installation - I run as a limited user, if 3rd party utilities wont install without admin rights to c:/temp I make the decision wheather I really need them.
I also develop software and like to experiment with future technologies. This has the unfortunate consequence that I install beta SDKs as soon and as often as they are released. Which of course has led to a lot of remnants from failed uninstallers sitting around my machine. On occasion things blow up and everything stops working - like the time stale assemblies from SQL Express stopped WPF applications from loading. However rather than reformat and reinstall I actually make the effort to fix things, usually learning something interesting along the way.
But, maybe the time has come. While I don't have any major problems, and any speed issues would likely be cured by a good defrag, my machine is... a mess. I could hunt down and clean everything up, but it's probably not worth the effort.
Here's an example - my web browser sends the following User Agent, I wouldn't be at all suprised if this string is unique to my machine alone.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Tablet PC 1.7; .NET CLR 1.2.30703; .NET CLR 2.0.50215; Avalon 6.0.4030; %WAP version%; InfoPath.2; WinFX RunTime 3.0.50727)
And another - Remnants from 8 versions of the CLR, way back to when CLR 2.0 was actually 1.2:
Directory of C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework 21/12/2004 01:35 PM <DIR> ___v2.0.40607 25/01/2005 01:07 PM <DIR> v2.0.40903 25/01/2005 01:23 PM <DIR> v1.2.30703 30/03/2005 11:53 AM <DIR> v2.0.40607 23/06/2005 04:56 PM <DIR> v2.0.50110 14/09/2005 07:27 PM <DIR> v1.1.4322 14/09/2005 07:27 PM <DIR> v1.0.3705 19/11/2005 08:49 AM <DIR> v2.0.50215 19/11/2005 09:25 AM <DIR> VJSharp 25/05/2006 11:38 AM <DIR> v2.0.50727
