OT OS issue

[Garrett Goebel]

Jack wrote:
> 
> Best bet is:
> 
> 1) back up any data,
> 2) format and reinstall,
> 3) apply all patches,
> 4) 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


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