Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Any tips for setting up a new Win7 laptop and installing lots of software fast?

<< < (3/6) > >>

dr_andus:
Thank you all for all the advice.  :Thmbsup:

be sure that you are happy with your partitons *before* you do all that work of installing all that software.
-tomos (September 24, 2015, 02:17 PM)
--- End quote ---

It looks like HP has already decided to partition the HD for me... I need to figure out what's going on here, before I delete/uninstall these. At the moment it looks like this:

Any tips for setting up a new Win7 laptop and installing lots of software fast?

Drive D: looks like a system image to return the device to factory settings. Drive E: seems to be set up for updating BIOS, storing SpareKey (some kind of password recovery solution), and some system diagnostic logs.

I'm not too bothered about the 2GB E: drive, but 15GB is kind of a big chunk for the recovery D:. Again, I'll need to read the manual this weekend to figure out what it's for and whether I'm better off leaving it alone.

wraith808:
I'd personally leave those alone.  In general (my dells are like this now) instead of including boot media and such, they include recovery partitions.  So unless you're changing drives, or your drive fails, everything is there.  My two newest ones, I just press f10 and get into the recovery tools.  So unless they include a way to create recovery media separate from these, and you've already done it, I'd leave it alone, personally.

40hz:
I'd personally leave those alone.  In general (my dells are like this now) instead of including boot media and such, they include recovery partitions.  So unless you're changing drives, or your drive fails, everything is there.  My two newest ones, I just press f10 and get into the recovery tools.  So unless they include a way to create recovery media separate from these, and you've already done it, I'd leave it alone, personally.
-wraith808 (September 25, 2015, 11:34 AM)
--- End quote ---

+1/w Wraith on the above. If I had a nickle for the number of times a client of mine deeply regretted screwing with (or reclaiming the space used by) that recovery tools "drive," I'd have an extra hundred bucks in my pocket.

Unless you do this stuff for a living, or you're exceptionally well organized and have plenty of spare time on your hands, it's better to just leave it alone. Odds are you'll never need it. But if you do, it's a huge time and grief saver should you ever have to do some serious system repair work, or a bare metal reinstall of your entire system.

FWIW, long before Dell and HP and the rest of them (IIRC Sony was the first) started doing this, my company used to create something similar on all the client laptops we were responsible for providing field service for. Nuff said?


 :Thmbsup:

dr_andus:
Unless you do this stuff for a living, or you're exceptionally well organized and have plenty of spare time on your hands, it's better to just leave it alone.
-40hz (September 25, 2015, 11:59 AM)
--- End quote ---

I'm certainly none of those.  ;) Understood. Thank you, guys.  :Thmbsup:

MilesAhead:
Unless you do this stuff for a living, or you're exceptionally well organized and have plenty of spare time on your hands, it's better to just leave it alone.
-40hz (September 25, 2015, 11:59 AM)
--- End quote ---

I'm certainly none of those.  ;) Understood. Thank you, guys.  :Thmbsup:
-dr_andus (September 25, 2015, 12:03 PM)
--- End quote ---

Therein lies the beauty of having a guinea pig machine.  If you decide you want to learn to manipulate partitions you can always experiment on the expendable PC.  But you can do without the 15 GB for a long time.  There's likely other ways to spend your time setting up.  Plus MBR is on the way out.  GPT and UEFI are taking over.  Manipulating the MBR will be an archaic skill very soon.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page