Reinstalling Windows can be a pain sometimes, but in reality, it doesn’t have to be. When you do your next reinstall, take some time to set things up well, and your next one will be a breeze, 5 minutes of work.

The first step to take is to isolate windows on a hard drive or a partition, and don’t use that part of your hard disks for anything else. I typically give windows 45Gb of space, and all I use that for is Windows itself and applications I install. If you don’t do anything else on this drive, you should have a healthy 10Gb free all the time, meaning your system performance will not be hindered by lack of space.

Windows stores all your stuff on its own drive, so things in “My Documents”, “My Images” are all stored, by default, on the same drive as Windows is installed. It is pretty easy to relocate these folders though, just right click on “My Music” for example, select properties, and in the location tab, specify a different location. I actually create a separate drive for the “My XYZ” folders, as these are files I might need any time, so being able to easily back them up or take them with me is essential. Once you’ve completed the above two steps you have eliminated about 80% of the work, since there will be no copying 30GB of files from one drive to another so you can delete your Windows installation. Now, how about going a step further?

Another time waster when you reinstall Windows, or any system, is the process of restoring all the applications you’ve used. This need not be such a task, you can use portable versions of your most used apps like Firefox, Filezilla, Thunderbird, GIMP, and a LOT more. Take a look at PortableApps to download tons of great portable apps. I have a separate partition for these as well, about 10Gb, but I rarely use more than 1 GB here. If my laptop fails on me, I still have a copy of my apps in the state I left them, I can resume work on another laptop or desktop PC in a few minutes. When reinstalling Windows I don’t even need to do anything, my apps are just there. Now I think we’ve eliminated about 90% of the work you need to do, let’s take it another step further.

I haven’t looked into Windows 7, but there are Windows automated install tools available for XP and Vista called nLite and vLite respectively. These apps are great for slimming down your OS, and for making installs as hassle free as possible. First of all, you can get rid of all the cr*p installed with Windows, like 1GB of printer drivers, in fact, if you’re content with few features you can slim down Vista to fit on a single CD. More importantly for our purposes here, you can also set up automation, like automatically filling out your name, serial, language options, etc. You can also add drivers and integrate fixes onto the installation. This means that apart from pressing any button if you want to boot from the CD, and setting up the drive to install the OS on, you won’t need to do anything else.

If you have any tips for reinstalling Windows in a flash, please let us know! Also, why not follow us on Twitter?

Not another Monday morning! Look at it another way, it’s a new week, a new clean slate in a sense, perhaps this week we can be better, work more, and also have more time for a little rest. In any case, here’s a productive start to the week, enjoy!

Hack Your Day

• Checking up on your hourly rate with Klok
  If you like quoting fixed numbers to clients, checking up on your real hourly rate is one of your most important management tasks. With Klok you can set and monitor your time spent on a project.
• Feed reading evolved with Feedly
  Reading feeds has never been so fun and visually appealing as it has become with feedly. The feature list and extremely awesomeness is just impossible to describe, you just have to give it a go!

Other great blogs

• Readability Extension for Google Chrome – on Lifehacker
• Setting limits with a Super Simple Month – on Unclutterer
• Lammer Context Menu – on FreewareGenius
• Some of the Best and Really Cool Free Media Players – on Technology Bites

If you do any blogging you probably know about Wordpress, if not, then you must check it out, it’s completely free and awesome. Changing blog themes frequently is not an option for most commercial sites, but if you have a personal blog you can find and implement some really cool themes, so here’s a short list of the best places to find them!

Wordpress Free Themes directory

The directory on the Wordpress site has a lot of themes, but the drawback of it is that you might have to sieve through a lot to find the right theme for you. If you have a recent Wordpress version you can also search this database from inside your blog, in the appearances section, making it super-easy to find great looks.

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Oh how I love to watch an episode of Friends before bed, but oh how hard it is to transfer the thing on to my iPhone! Well, not any more, transferring videos to my iPhone has become a cinch with iPodMe, a minimalist application which converts videos into a format appropriate for Apple products.

Until a few days ago, I always wanted to watch some movies on my iPhone in bed, it’s just easier than to lug my laptop around with me, but I was hindered by the fact that it took me 30 minutes to convert a 40 minute long video. Since I am no codec master I am sure this was my own problem, but with iPodMe I drag and drop my video, press a button, and it spits my finished file out in about 6 minutes.

The codecs and whatnot come with the app which is a single executable, no install required. Once started, just drag and drop your vids in, select a resolution and convert. I’ve been looking for an app like this for a while, so let’s all thank Freewaregenius for finding it for me! (They also have a way better review, so take a look!)

If your job includes design, sometimes your biggest time waster can be waiting for feedback from a client, or from your friends. You spend a whole day to get every detail right, you send out your work, and then you have to wait 1-2 days for any reaction, and in many cases this could be “give me a day or two more to go over it”. By using Concept Feedback you could cut to the chase by showing off your work to the design community, putting your heads together to improve your design.

The site has a rating system, so you can see what people thing in numbers, but generally the more comments an item has, the better it is. Each commenter also votes on design, purpose, originality and engagement, so you can easily see where to improve. Users can also rate comments, so it is very clear what the most important bit of information is. The great thing about the site is that there isn’t really any inappropriate behavior. Weather this is because it is well moderated, or designers are just so cool, I don’t know, but generally comments really are helpful and encouraging.

If you are just starting out, this website is a great tool to use to further your skills. People will generally try to be constructive about their criticism. I recently saw a truly bad illustration, it looked like it was done in MS Paint, in a bad way, and while people did say it’s bad, they weren’t rude, and left tips on what to do.

My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

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