see also How do I change the system wide collation setting in SQL Server 2005
Is there an easier way to change the system wide (temp db) collation setting in SQL Server 2008 other then a full restore?
If I do a full reinstall is there a quicker way of keeping my database other then doing a backup/restore.
(As this is a development PC, database downtime while this is being done is not an issue)
Not that I know of. If you think about what has to happen it makes sense; the RDBMS has save the text data to disk with a set of codes to represent the individual characters in each piece of text. Now you are asking to potentially change the encoding of each character, which of course means looking at each one and possibly changing it. And it may have to allocate more or less space for each character depending on the from/to collation.