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<TITLE>RE: OT OS issue</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Jack wrote:</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> Best bet is:</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> 1) back up any data,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> 2) format and reinstall,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> 3) apply all patches,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> 4) reconfigure and reinstall any necessary 3rd party stuff. </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>I feel your pain. I just bought my wife a new laptop and recycled the old one for my daughter. I spent the first 2-3 hours on my wife's machine applying patches, updating stuff, and migrating data over. My daughter's machine took about 6 hours.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>On #3, depending on the hardware, you need to look at your hardware vendor's website before blindly applying all Microsoft updates. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>When I booted off the "recovery" disks to restore my wife's old laptop to the factory default drive image... The first site I visted was Sony support. There were a couple updates for her laptop which read "apply this if XP locks up after installing the patch for Microsoft Knowledgebook ######...". Funny how I'd never been able to install XPsp2 because her machine locked up solid during the sp2 install... There were also Sony updates I couldn't install until after I'd applied XP service packs. So you really may have to interleave hardware vendor updates and Microsoft ones.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>If you need storage capacity, consider going down to MicroCenter, they currently have a deal on a Western Digital 7200RPM 120GB drive for $50 after rebates. They also have a $25 external usb drive enclosure. Its cheap looking, but it works. As a bonus, it is fairly easy to pull off the USB+power component and switch over to an IDE connector.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>You might also want to pick up a copy of Norton Ghost. Make sure it supports XP (XP's NTFS). They had a deal on Ghost at CompuUSA a while back for $40 after rebates. We use ghost a lot at work. I've heard Ghost 9+ is really Partition Magic Drive Imager made over to look like Ghost. It can do incremental images and scheduled backups. You can traverse and selectively copy files out of an image, and you can also supposedly mount backup images as a drive letter.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>If there's an OSS version of Ghost that works on NTFS partitions without requiring extensive reading and tweaking, please let me know. Funny how those proprietary OS's so often require proprietary $$$ backup solutions.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>--</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Garrett Goebel</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>IS Development Specialist</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>www.scriptpro.com garrett at scriptpro dot com</FONT>
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