Jack wrote:
Best bet is:
- back up any data,
- format and reinstall,
- apply all patches,
- reconfigure and reinstall any necessary 3rd party stuff.
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.
On #3, depending on the hardware, you need to look at your hardware vendor's website before blindly applying all Microsoft updates.
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.
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.
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.
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 $$$ backup solutions.
-- Garrett Goebel IS Development Specialist
ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261 5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008 Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180 www.scriptpro.com garrett at scriptpro dot com
On Mon, May 2, 2005 9:15 am, Garrett Goebel said:
If there's an OSS version of Ghost that works on NTFS partitions without requiring extensive reading and tweaking, please let me know.
Some versions of PartImage will work with NTFS.
The problem is that MS has played around with NTFS, varying the features and implementation among different releases. Standard, straight-forward NT4 NTFS works fine with the native Linux drivers, but some of the more obscure implementations (upgrades on Win9x-XP installs?) can have problems when writing within the NTFS partition. This shouldn't be an issue for an Image program, but then again, it's Microsoft.
DriveImage worked very well, so well that as pointed out before, Symantec bought it and dropped their Partition Magic in favor of it.
Funny how those proprietary OS's so often require proprietary $$$ backup solutions.
It's called "lock-in", and it's what proprietary is all about.
On 5/3/05, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
On Mon, May 2, 2005 9:15 am, Garrett Goebel said:
If there's an OSS version of Ghost that works on NTFS partitions without
requiring
extensive reading and tweaking, please let me know.
Some versions of PartImage will work with NTFS.
The problem is that MS has played around with NTFS, varying the features and implementation among different releases. Standard, straight-forward NT4 NTFS works fine with the native Linux drivers, but some of the more obscure implementations (upgrades on Win9x-XP installs?) can have problems when writing within the NTFS partition. This shouldn't be an issue for an Image program, but then again, it's Microsoft.
DriveImage worked very well, so well that as pointed out before, Symantec bought it and dropped their Partition Magic in favor of it.
Funny how those proprietary OS's so often require proprietary $$$ backup
solutions.
It's called "lock-in", and it's what proprietary is all about.
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