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

[Savor the Stick]

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

So, you have a stick of RAM, a fan and that's it?

One thing you'll want to do is max out the RAM on the motherboard. Whatever you think is excessive now, won't be in 4 years. At that 4 year mark, you PC will at least be decent since it will be average by then.

I have the tower case, HD, power supply, ram 16 gb, case fans (6), fan controller, and an aftermarket cpu cooler.

[Savor the Stick]

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

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Partition is like slicing the harddrive into pie pieces. Instead of just having a c: drive, you'll have an additional letter like d: or f:. The advantage is that if you screw up your PC, it tends to stick to just the partition. If you blow away c:, you still have a copy of your machine on the other partition.

Most PC manufacturers have a small partition on their drive when you buy a computer. Partitioning is not as popular as it was, but it's still a necessary if you want to build you computer "the right way". There are plenty of good web sites that can walk you through this.

As for how big to make the 2nd partition, consider doing 10% of the total drive space.

As how to do this, there are several ways. If you are formatting the disk, fdisk is the easiest way to create a partition. Diskpart can create a partition as well.

Thanks for the lesson.

[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.

[mmblz]

SSD is most noticeable on startup, when it makes a huge difference. Faster boot of a VM, too. Makes sense, at startup, the OS needs to read LOTS of files. I think it would also be incredibly helpful for something like video editing where you're constantly doing big read/writes. Of course for that you'd also run out of space fast
From everything I read a month or two, just be sure that the SSD you choose has the Sandforce controller.

If you want to get fancy with the secondary drive, get a simple 2 drive mirrored RAID.

[mosesbotbol]

Originally Posted by mmblz

IF the disk fails you're still focked

Data is recoverable if a harddrive "is broken", but can be expensive. The last time I used a data recovery service it was around $500, but they got all the data I needed off.

[Silound]

If you plan to upgrade to Windows 8 right at release, don't bother doing anything right now. Win8 will release sometime in November, and there's no reason to go through the ~4hour process of installing and updating Windows XP just to install Win8 in a few months. Come to think of it, there's no reason to sit through an XP install, period. If you absolutely must do a fresh install, pick Windows 7.


Back up your files to another device prior to migration! There is always a chance that files can be lost. There is no more secure way to back up files than to have another copy somewhere. Be wary of Microsoft's migration tool. It is very powerful, but if you don't specify certain things, it will only copy files it finds in Microsoft-created folders (My Documents, My Music, etc). Some people store their files in other locations, some programs save files to the program directory. Be sure you know exactly what files you want to save and where they are located. If you have to, use search to make sure you find files and copy them out. You can connect an external hard drive or even another computer over the network and simply copy all of your files from your computer to the other device with a simple copy and paste. Make sure you can open all of your files on another computer prior to doing a wipe. Losing data sucks!



I do NOT recommend any of my clients partition hard drives anymore. Partitioning was a common practice 15 years ago when storage options were expensive and people required multiple operating systems to run on one computer. There is virtually no performance gained by partitioning for the average users, and if something were to destroy that partitioning table, it is more painful of a process to restore. Hard drives are very cheap, and most modern motherboards will support a boot-loader that lets you pick which hard drive (thereby which operating system) you wish to boot to.


I will agree, a Solid-State Drive is an amazing thing for boot times. Unfortunately, the price/performance curve is not worthwhile to the average user unless you feel you absolutely need to boot in under 20 seconds.

[Savor the Stick]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

Originally Posted by mmblz

SSD is most noticeable on startup, when it makes a huge difference. Faster boot of a VM, too. Makes sense, at startup, the OS needs to read LOTS of files. I think it would also be incredibly helpful for something like video editing where you're constantly doing big read/writes. Of course for that you'd also run out of space fast
From everything I read a month or two, just be sure that the SSD you choose has the Sandforce controller.

If you want to get fancy with the secondary drive, get a simple 2 drive mirrored RAID.

OK you guys have me looking at SSD now. How big is Win7? and what size of SSD should I get?

Originally Posted by Silound

If you plan to upgrade to Windows 8 right at release, don't bother doing anything right now. Win8 will release sometime in November, and there's no reason to go through the ~4hour process of installing and updating Windows XP just to install Win8 in a few months. Come to think of it, there's no reason to sit through an XP install, period. If you absolutely must do a fresh install, pick Windows 7.


Back up your files to another device prior to migration! There is always a chance that files can be lost. There is no more secure way to back up files than to have another copy somewhere. Be wary of Microsoft's migration tool. It is very powerful, but if you don't specify certain things, it will only copy files it finds in Microsoft-created folders (My Documents, My Music, etc). Some people store their files in other locations, some programs save files to the program directory. Be sure you know exactly what files you want to save and where they are located. If you have to, use search to make sure you find files and copy them out. You can connect an external hard drive or even another computer over the network and simply copy all of your files from your computer to the other device with a simple copy and paste. Make sure you can open all of your files on another computer prior to doing a wipe. Losing data sucks!



I do NOT recommend any of my clients partition hard drives anymore. Partitioning was a common practice 15 years ago when storage options were expensive and people required multiple operating systems to run on one computer. There is virtually no performance gained by partitioning for the average users, and if something were to destroy that partitioning table, it is more painful of a process to restore. Hard drives are very cheap, and most modern motherboards will support a boot-loader that lets you pick which hard drive (thereby which operating system) you wish to boot to.


I will agree, a Solid-State Drive is an amazing thing for boot times. Unfortunately, the price/performance curve is not worthwhile to the average user unless you feel you absolutely need to boot in under 20 seconds.

I plan on holding off on Win8 for a couple of years...so if any bugs or such will have time to show up. So I will be picking up Win7 for the new build.





Thanks everyone for their input...been priceless.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!