A month later and I can now tell you that I don’t have a url – I haven’t used that prog for about 4 years. Google will have it though: Search for “Duplicate file finder” or something similar.

Thanks,

Giovanna

The family PC (a Dell XPS Gen 5) is loaded with crap, and is extremely sluggish, not to mention I get strange blue pixels on the screen wherever there’s a bright spot (i.e, on a light source in games), so I decided to do a wipe.

I think an OS reinstall is obviously the best way to go in this situation. Thanks for the tip about Dell systems, by the way. That will really come in handy this time around (last time, it took me forever to track down all the neccesary drivers).

Unfortunately, when working on someone else’s machine, the problem tends to be they don’t know where there cd’s for the original applications are…nor have they done backups. If they are an old customer, I have already made images of there drive’s from original install, that I can use on a new hard drive or wipe the old drive and install.

If the cd’s can’t be found, I then use a number of open source products to install because of course they don’t want to go out and buy a new installation of Word…money is always the problem. I then will make a image of this hard drive, for the next possible time.

When building a new machine…I totally do an install, because everyone wants something different in or on their machines.

With my own machines, I backup only my data, because I know when a new edition of Ubuntu comes out, I will wipe my hard drive and do a totally clean install, so I have all new packages to play with. I do have all my firefox bookmarks and such saved at foxmarks, so I never lose those.

Granted it installs all the unwanted crap from the previous disk; but there is software that can clean that out before imaging takes place –

For instance I use Optimize 2 from PC Pitstop for keeping the registry in order: Those of you who are following the Uniblue thread on PCMech will be familiar with Uniblue Registry Booster; which I’ve also used and recommend. (Personally I prefer the GUI of Optimize 2; otherwise both are equally as effective.)

There is also a freeware program that deletes duplicate files, as well as one that deletes orphaned .dlls from uninstalled software.

I have Diskeeper Professional 2008 (Which isn’t freeware.) running in the background constantly: This useful little investment identifies when fragmentation on any internal drive gets to a level that requires attention, and then auto-defrags the drive. This automatically keeps fragmentation down to a minimum level 99% of the time.

Imaging utilities such as Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, as mentioned, are top-rated utilities; although, as I have found, imaging can be accomplished using the Windows Automatic System recovery utility included with the operating system. This is installed as standard with XP professional, but you’ll have to install it from the Windows CD if using XP Home: In the “Valueadd” folder on XP Home the CD you’ll find a folder called “MSFT”, and in that folder you’ll find one called “NTBACKUP”. Open that folder and run the file “NTBACKUP.MSI”: This will add backup to XP Home; although you still won’t be able to make an Automated System Recovery disk; so you’ll have to manually select everything on the disk and back it all up using the backup facility.

One thing you will find is that Windows Backup or ASR will start kicking up about the new disk being bigger than the image data says it is if you’re restoring your Windows backup to a new larger HDD; but that’s not that hard a problem to overcome: Just think geek and use common sense.

Reinstalling the OS and starting from scratch only gets done by me in the case of backup failure, (Online AND external HDD backup failure.) or lethal multiple virus attack – Both of which have actually happened to me once surprisingly.