Wiping the Drive???-- and complete reload of XP???

[BlindedByScience]

Originally Posted by Bill86

I haven't read into Windows 8 but I always wait a year or so before moving to the current OS. Just get the general consensus as to whether people like it and it's stable enough to upgrade. Saved me from going to Vista

http://www.dban.org/ <--That's DBAN, a little reading for you. It's a ~3 hour wipe.

....we have it in the labs here and the "in house" reviews here are very mixed. I've seen at least one blog call it "...the new Vista...".

Not for me - W7-64 is just too good.....

Edited to add - you can get a slug of great utilities on a bootable CD for free (Including DBAN). Having all this stuff on a bootable CD is way, way convenient when you're working on PC's. Visit:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

...download the ISO, burn a CD. I use this all the time, here in the lab, and at home when I'm building or working on PC's

[Bill86]

I never partition the hard drives, just run with 2 different hard drives. I'd go with a Solid State for your OS and a nice dump drive of 1 TB+ for storage. Worse comes to worse you just reload and all your important stuff is on the storage drive. You just have to reinstall programs and that's all.

People might fight me on the SSD and say it's useless or you won't need it....But there are a few users here that I recommended it to and I'm sure they would gladly vouch for being happy they did.

It just makes everything faster. Even if you don't do A LOT of stuff on the computer who doesn't like the boot times and shutdown times being cut by 70% or so. My shutdown is like 4-5 seconds. Boot time maybe 30-40 seconds.

I've never timed it or anything but yeah, it's quick. Browsing folder to folder is instant, moving files is VERY quick.

Originally Posted by BlindedByScience

....we have it in the labs here and the "in house" reviews here are very mixed. I've seen at least one blog call it "...the new Vista...".

Not for me - W7-64 is just too good.....

Edited to add - you can get a slug of great utilities on a bootable CD for free (Including DBAN). Having all this stuff on a bootable CD is way, way convenient when you're working on PC's. Visit:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

...download the ISO, burn a CD. I use this all the time, here in the lab, and at home when I'm building or working on PC's

Agreed with this. Part of the reason I haven't bothered to look into Windows 8, I can't see a need to.

Yeah DBAN is easy to burn to a CD as well, I have I dunno 15 CDs of DBAN in case I don't feel like plugging in computers and using a PXE server to have DBAN run on 1-24 computers at once.