Formating and reinstalling OS

[Night Train]

My laptop was running really slow and spent a lot of time at or around 100% processor usage even when nothing seemed to be running.

So I've just spent most of yesterday evening and night and all this morning formatting my hard drive in my laptop and reinstalling Vista.
What a palava! So many difficulties with partitioning and finding serial numbers and relocating my internet favorites and de bugging and scanning for viruses, etc.
Thankfully I back up everything so the information and data is always somewhere.

How often you you format and reinstall the operating system and do you have a 'system' to make it easier?

 

[ACS]

Based on having done far too many reinstalls I now use Acronis True Image Home (other image software available i.e Norton Ghost) to take an image of the final build on every PC I complete. This means that a rebuild is almost a single click and forget option and takes an hour or so instead of 4 to 5 hours when I could be be out being murdered by any hill I happen to come up against.

 

[Carwash]

How often you you format and reinstall the operating system

Whenever there's a new release. Barring a catastrophic hardware failure, why on earth would you want to do it more often than that?

 

[Night Train]

Whenever there's a new release. Barring a catastrophic hardware failure, why on earth would you want to do it more often than that?

It removes any unwanted downloads, spyware, bloatware, viruses, spam, advertising bumph, etc that gets stored everytime the OS, antivirus, firewall, etc. does an update.

My laptop was running at or near 100% processor churning over 'nothing' after a few minutes of start up. Now it is back to running at about 2-5%.

 

[Carwash]

It removes any unwanted downloads, spyware, bloatware, viruses, spam, advertising bumph, etc that gets stored everytime the OS, antivirus, firewall, etc. does an update.

Oh, right, sorry - hadn't twigged it was a Windows thing. Just ignore me! I'm amazed you put up with it.

 

[Bman]

This is the process I usually follow (bear in mind I have windows XP, with a few Raid arrays) and only do this every few years.

1. Uninstall everything (except things like nero (I may need to burn something) and winrar (in case I need to rar something)) When prompted, keep saved games and config files (only if you want to).
2. Delete my "temp internet files" and other temp folders. Also any old profiles you don’t want or folders in "program files" you no longer want.
3. Rar, then copy "documents and settings" and "program files" to a different drive (or burn to cd/dvd).
4. Shutdown, and unplug all arrays/drives other than the main system array/drive
5. Insert windows disc and reformat the system drive/array, then install windows.
6. After the new windows OS is installed, shutdown and re-install your other drives/arrays
7. Extract or copy your "documents and settings" and "program files" over to the new system drive as required.

I usually don’t restore any "program files" folders unless I want my old savegames/settings back, and do this if/when I next re-install the program/game.

Also I only copy, what I need from my old profile: favourites, my documents etc. I also try to rename them so in my new "my documents" folder, I have an "old documents" folder with all my old stuff in there.

I hope this makes sense, I didn’t want to elaborate any further.

 

[Night Train]

Oh, right, sorry - hadn't twigged it was a Windows thing. Just ignore me! I'm amazed you put up with it.

Yeah, I'm amazed I still put up with it. I will, one day, get a Mac.

 

[Carwash]

Yeah, I'm amazed I still put up with it. I will, one day, get a Mac.

Or Linux. Or BSD. In fact, I'm pretty sure Windows is the *only* modern OS that forces you to jump through these sorts of hoops. It doesn't have to be like this! You have my pity - best of luck with the re-install.

 

[beanzontoast]

My laptop was running really slow and spent a lot of time at or around 100% processor usage even when nothing seemed to be running.

So I've just spent most of yesterday evening and night and all this morning formatting my hard drive in my laptop and reinstalling Vista.

There are many discussion threads about Vista's constant background activity, indexing etc - Google it and you'll find loads. One of the reasons I went back to Xp was I found Vista slow: the constant resource-hogging and disk activity, even when I wasn't running any programs myself, got to be a real annoyance too. I never found it a fast OS, and my machine has 3gigs of ram.

 

[Night Train]

I would make the step back to XP if I had a usable disc. My desk top is XP but the rescue OS is stored on a partition of the HD so that PC World can sort it but I can't use it elsewhere.

The Vista sidebar alone prioritises about 60% of the processor just to stay updated on the desktop! It and other useless functions are all disabled on my laptop.

 

[Black Sheep]

My laptop was running really slow and spent a lot of time at or around 100% processor usage even when nothing seemed to be running.

So I've just spent most of yesterday evening and night and all this morning formatting my hard drive in my laptop and reinstalling Vista.
What a palava! So many difficulties with partitioning and finding serial numbers and relocating my internet favorites and de bugging and scanning for viruses, etc.
Thankfully I back up everything so the information and data is always somewhere.

How often you you format and reinstall the operating system and do you have a 'system' to make it easier?

with XP its whenever it goes pear shaped, which, if i'm using the computer regulally is about once a month and the windows disk lives on my desk to aid with this.

the mac's just sit there and plod on with no problem, no need to re-install the OS yet

 

[twowheelsgood]

Use Clonezilla, it's free, boots from a USB stick and works with any file system (it can fall back on dd if nothing else). It also has pretty good support to back-up to USB sticks etc.

When I install, I take images at 3 points:

1. On completion of the install from the installer disk
2 1 + all current Windows updates + drivers + tweaks to registry (I always disable last acces stamps and several processes including indexing), settings, ramdisk etc.
3 2 + Applications.

Bongman's method seems masochistic to me. Plus the fact things still may not work properly from step 7 as you would have lost your registry during the re-install. You can't really copy over most programs as they'll be missing dlls ocxs etc.

Mind you practically the only time I ever have to re-image is either to clean-up if I've been installing stuff to tryout or hardware failure. Unless you mess with things, install junk or don't protect yourself properly, Windows won't break. The problem is Windows is too flexible and allows ordinary users to do too many things - but then people complain when UAC asks them for permission every five minutes or if your OS has a miserable, restricted selection of hardware to choose from.

 

[Crackle]

Hardly ever now, only when a disk fails or similiar. I get problems and sometimes it takes a while to track them down but every one is solvable. I think the last one was a dodgy SATA cable which for all the world looked like a hard disk failure. It takes me two days to rebuild and configure as before with all settings in various programs, I don't want that pain.