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After re-installing XP - what?

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JennyB:
Last week my three-year-old Packard Bell began blue-screening, and finally refused to boot. I hadn't any system disk, so it was back to the dealers. Fortunately my documents were backed up - but I lost some programs, and it took a day or two to get everything back more or less the way I liked it.

On the bright side I also got rid of a lot of programs that had looked useful at the time, and everything looks cleaner, simpler and faster. For now. 

But I've still got that itch to try stuff out, so what is a best strategy for keeping a clean fall-back before I start messing it all up again?  :tellme:

MilesAhead:
If you can afford docking stations and/or external USB drives, the simplest is to make a backup image using a program like Macrium Reflect or Paragon Software or one of the other imaging programs.

If the machine becomes unbootable, or you just want to go back, you boot from CD and restore an image from the external drive.  Some will also restore over network if you have networked drives.

On my systems I installed a USB 3.0 card.  It gives you 2 USB ports.  I plug in a USB 3.0 docking station and just stick an internal drive into the dock.  USB 3.0 is fast.  I have WD Caviar Black 6 Gbs and 3 Gbs internal drives I use in the docks.  By keeping a lot of data on these I can keep my system disks lean enough that I can clean 'em up a bit with CCleaner, defrag, then have greater than 70% free space. I back up that image.  Even from a USB 2.0 drive you can restore in less than an hour if you keep your system drives lean.

I haven't had to restore from USB 3.0 yet. I have to make a WinPE boot with the USB 3.0 driver to get the speed. (But I have USB 2.0 docks in case of emergency.)

For the additional storage it depends how  you want to set up. If you want everything in the tower you may want to use some of those drive adapters that let you can plug drives in like sliding in a drawer. I don't mind having docks all over my desk so I went with docking stations. Or you can do NAT networked externals etc..

But the simplest with no messing around is, back up the image to USB 2.0 external drive.  Make a boot CD.  You can try a new OS. I put Windows Seven Beta on my Vista machine, tried Windows Seven 64 bit.  Didn't like it.  Put the Vista64 that came with the machine back on.  Using the images and Macrium Reflect.

The main thing is make sure the restore program on the boot CD can see your HD and the external drive when you boot it.  If you have a Raid driver or some other unusual hardware you can get an unpleasant surprise when you go to restore.

They are easy to use once you've done one.  If you have an expendable machine or know someone with a guinea pig machine, you could do a backup and restore just to see how it goes.  When your machine won't boot the mood is usually one that hampers thinking. You don't want to figure it out then.  If you've done a run through, then you have confidence you can fix it.

Also if you can afford more than one external or use the approach that allows you to remove internal drives, it's a good idea to keep a backup image not connected to the machine. If you get a virus that spreads across your Lan you can disinfect, then hook up the external that wasn't connected to get a safe restore.

For free backup programs for imaging you can try:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

widgewunner:
You may want to try out one of the virtual PC softwares such as VirtualBox (which is free). Each virtual PC you create (which can have any major operating system you would like installed) is completely isolated and you can be very brave playing around with it. If it crashes or catches a virus, no problem - just reset it back to its original fresh install state.

I have very limited experience with this technology so far but I know others who swear by this method. (I've been playing around with VirtualBox recently.)

MilesAhead:
VirtualBox is nice.  Also you can use vLite to create an XP install CD with some of the stuff, like games, stripped off.  You can set it to automatically fill in the product key.  Makes for a smoother install.  Just be conservative what you strip out. If you try to take out things like IE it may install, but not run correctly.

The XP install CD made with vLite is handy for doing VirtualBox installs.

The trouble with vLite is it doesn't package your currently installed programs. Just the Windows stuff.  But there are other scripting tools that will create an install CD or DVD with your favorite programs already set up.  But the hassle is testing the scripts. (Another case for VirtualBox. You can test your installs without actually creating a partition.)

You can find out just about anything to do with custom booting here:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/

4wd:
Also you can use vLite to create an XP install CD with some of the stuff, like games, stripped off.-MilesAhead (November 11, 2010, 06:49 PM)
--- End quote ---

vlite for Vista.

nlite for XP.

For already packaged addons that can be added via nlite:
johndoe74's addons
rado354's addons
Addon list

MSFN is the place to go for anything related to Unattended, Addons or stripping down Windows installations.

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