It took about a week to reload the different applications that I run but I now have a system that is consistently faster, and doesn't have the garbage on it from loading and unloading test applications. Refreshing your computer by doing a fresh load every 3 to 6 months does wonders for your productivity. The downside is the time lost during the reconstruction.
During the down time, I was using my desktop from home at the office. I didn't want it to be joined to our network so I started using the terminal server client to access most of our applications that I run on a daily basis. What struck me was how painless it was to be able to jump between the live windows session and the terminal session as I was doing different projects. The one drawback I did find was that because I did not join this machine to the network was a little hard to move files between two sessions. But it could be done without too much trouble.
Now that I have the laptop up and loaded, I am running most of our legacy applications, we have some Access 97 databases, our accounting system, and our CRM program that are rather dated, on a terminal server. And I am running all my research with Internet Explorer, OneNote, and Office Applications in the notebooks operating system. Because I'm using their RAM from the terminal server I have found that I'm running much faster than before when I have ten to twelve applications running at the same time. It makes sense now that I think about it and I am glad that have taken advantage of this ability.
If you have any questions about the process I went through or if you want to know more about remote access and terminal services feel free to let me know and we can discuss this further. Happy Easter!