Posts Tagged ‘reinstall’

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?