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Poll: Did you install Windows or was it pre-installed?

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zridling:
Yea, but even XP's installation is far more task-intensive for the user than Vista's. I think Vista is mainly an unattended installation except for two prompts. Ah, progress.

40hz:
Install!

I poke around the OEM install first to see if I can learn anything of value. That hasn't happened yet but you never know right?  ;)

But after that, I flatline (i.e. wipe + low level format & recertify) and do a squeaky clean install of XP or some flavor of Linux on every machine. The only exception has been on those machines that had a diagnostics or recovery partition. In those cases I just reformatted the NTFS partition and did a clean install.

After all the updates and tweaks and product activations I also do a "Genesis" image with Clonezilla or Acronis TrueImage and burn it to a DVD just in case I need a recovery disk done the way I think it should be done.

f0dder:
But after that, I flatline (i.e. wipe + low level format & recertify) and do a squeaky clean install of XP or some flavor of Linux on every machine.-40hz (June 27, 2008, 09:48 AM)
--- End quote ---
There's no such thing as low level format for consumer since MFM disks went out of production :)

40hz:
But after that, I flatline (i.e. wipe + low level format & recertify) and do a squeaky clean install of XP or some flavor of Linux on every machine.-40hz (June 27, 2008, 09:48 AM)
--- End quote ---
There's no such thing as low level format for consumer since MFM disks went out of production :)
-f0dder (June 27, 2008, 10:11 AM)
--- End quote ---

"Great Googly Moogly" --- You're absolutely correct! :Thmbsup:

My fault for actually letting myself use the modern misnomer when I probably should have said "zero-fill erase."

I used to argue that point with clients all the time, but I eventually gave up when Seagate et al started abusing the term on their websites. Always difficult to explain to a non-technical type why their "Computer Guy" is disagreeing with the people that made the drive. Especially when the person you're arguing with is also writing your check.
 
Yes. We've come a long way from those days when you had to go into DEBUG and do a GO on a hexaddr. Tingatingatingatinga...ditditdit...such sweet music those gigantic 20Mb drives made as they formatted! Then along came RLE drives and all the little antics they could could get up to. So little time for the simple pleasures...

Sure don't miss them. ;)


BTW - after I read your response I suddenly got nostalgic. I took a look in my storage room and found my old Northgate Elegance 386-20 (s/n 54265-built in 1989) with 8Mb RAM and that exquisite OmnikeyUtra keyboard... My first "real" computer which was purchased for somewhere around $4K.



 I hauled it out, booted it, and damn if that old boat anchor didn't come up with WFWG 3.11! It even had a copy of TurboPascal and Smalltalk-V on it! That puppy has been sitting in storage since '91 and it still works. Amazing! Oh yeah, there's a 20Mb MFM hard drive in it too! Do I dare do a "g C800:5" in DEBUG and see if it will low-level for me?
:tellme:

f0dder:
40hz: *big grin* :D

Btw, I would say that "full format" would suffice instead of "zero-fill erase", but after doing a full format (which takes long enough that it should be zero-filling every darn sector!) and looking with a hex editor, it seems like there was still data on the drive - bigtime weirdness. And more data than just partition table, boot sector, and (mostly blank) NTFS metadata. I'll have to look a bit more into this.

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