How To Re-build Your PC

Well it's that time of the year again. The PC I put together a year ago is starting to give me the shits and I decided earlier today to frag it and re-build it before i go on leave next week. Then I can get back to a fresh pc, a clean office and a mind as still and empty as Jessica Simpsons.

But... there has to be a better way to do this. Why is re-building my PC such a drama? Please tell me what i should do in future to make this process easier.

Here's what i currently am doing.

1) Move all of my important data onto my secondary 200Gb hard drive. I keep all of my documents there anyway, but now i move Favourites folders and Skype folders and email archives etc. This takes HOURS.

2) Uninstall all of my applications. This takes HOURS.

3) Defrag. This takes HOURS.

4) Re-install Windows XP. Of course, when I put the CD into the drive and re-booted, it gave me some damn partitioning error which made NO SENSE whatsoever. I worked at Microsoft for 6 years and I had NO IDEA what the hell this error message is supposed to mean. What hope would my mother have? It said something about "you can't use this partition and you can't delete that unpartitioned partition and gee if you delete that partition you'll lose ALL your data, are you sure you want to do that?" Yeah I guess so, what the hell do I know? Oh yeah, re-installing Windows takes a good hour.

5) Then I have to upgrade Windows to SP2 cuz I dont have it on CD. That takes HOURS to download and install.

6) Re-install my wirless drivers and my key apps. Microsoft Office 2003 alone requires me to download the Service Packs and that takes HOURS. Installing all of my apps takes HOURS.

And then finally (fingers crossed) I have my PC back again. Oh, I'm typing this on my kids' PC while i wait.

So folks-smarter-than-me, how should i do this in future? Ghosting or some crap? HELP!

Comments

[Serdar Kilic]

I do much the same, except I don't defrag - I format. It's like your PC taking a bath instead of a wipe down with a moist towel. I'd make myself a nice coffee, put on a DVD, and relax :)

[Hilary]

keeping your user data on a different partition or even drive is the main thing.

Once you have your os installed and tweaked to perfection, ghost is as image and save that image to the same partition that you keep your user data. That way next time you can just boot off a ghost disk, load up the image from the data disk, and ghost your system disk.

This is basically how I set up laptops for friends of mine that work for NGO's that send them to remote places where they have to be able to recover quickly from problems . Short of major physical trauma to their hard disk they can get back up and running quickly.

for a real "red carpet" approach, start keeping a library of service packs and apps on that data disk of yours as well.

You end up with a data disk that's really vital to you, which also contains your patch and app library as well as your ghost image. Your system partition/drive is expendable and you can refresh it whenever you need to in about an hour or.

I burn my ghost image to a bootable dvd and I try and use that on every computer I ever have to deal with, including my personal computer. I also have a DVD with office, favourite apps and service packs. I then have a CD on "non SOE apps" that I carry around to install stuff that friends ask for, like itunes or firefox or picasa.

It took some time to get to that point, but by getting a regular habit of saving cool downloads to a different partition/disk and then occasionally burning it to disk, I generally don't have to rely on downloading anything but the most recent patches.

btw, microsoft australia will post you SP2 for free from this url:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

I've been filling that out for everyone I know for months - I've even used it to send disks to family as far as Italy. Snag yourself a copy, and anyone else you think should have it.