The Great Reboot
My development machine (Jerry) is in definite need of a reboot. Not a restart, mind you, but a complete format and reinstall of the OS and all programs. It’s something that I’ve been meaning to do, but haven’t gotten around to it.
But why an entire reinstall?
Well, this machine has been running on it’s current config for about 2 1/2 years (estimate), and that’s far too long to go without a good house-keeping. Although I don’t have any significant problems, especially in comparison to some it’s still a good idea. Also, Mark (linked article) said that he believes XP has a half-life of 9 months, this I disagree with, but I digress.
I do know however, what I will be doing differently this time around, which I have not done in sometime. Once I have backed up all of my data, any preferences that I care about, my email (just did this - 600Mb compressed w/out attachments) and my work, then I am going to do a fresh install of XP Pro - with Service Pack 1 and 2 (when available), as well as Office 2003 with all of it’s Patches. Then I will install any of my main programs that I use on a daily basis for Programming, FTP, and Graphics etc. This will be when I create an image of my config. I am going to utilize a program such as Norton Ghost, so that I can create a bootable and restorable copy of the image.
I may need to upgrade my PC soon anyway, certain games will no doubt need a better set of system hardware than I am currently running, however I can say that this machine has treated me rather well.
If anyone has any suggestions on the following processes, I’d appreciate it.
- Reinstall Procedure.
- Create Image Procedure.
- A proven Directory structure.
- A proven backup software package to do weekly backups onto CD.
- A process to backup to the Internet.
I doubt many, or any of these questions will be answered simply due to the amount of traffic I have on here, however I do appreciate any feedback I get. If any of you reading this could allow your readers to give me some suggestions, that’d be appreciated as well.
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