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Topic: Windows Clean Install--seeking advice

Daryl C. W. O'Shea
Film God

Posts: 3977
From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from)
Registered: Jun 2002

posted 11-11-2002 10:35 PM

My bad, I usually just tell people to 'uninstall it' since the procedure to revert to the last version is essentially the same as acutally uninstalling most any other program. Admittedly this doesn't work as well if you've upgraded IE multiple times, but usually the outcome is notably better than not doing this.

In Windows 2000 you would click 'Change/Remove' in the capture below.
Windows 98 is similar, just a different Window (and a whole lot of different code).

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 11-11-2002 11:28 PM

Several years ago, I would have cringed at doing a "clean install" of Windows. That really goes for those days when you had to install some flavor of MS-DOS and then put Windows 3.1 on top of it. All of those issues involving the 640k limit, high memory, those TSRs and other bullcrap made maintaining a PC a real pain in the ass. And then there was always that issue of whether your boot floppy would work properly (like actually allow the CD-ROM to be available on it).

Most PCs are pretty easy now. The single biggest improvement has to have been putting boot-from-CD right into the motherboard BIOS. Not much need for emergency boot floppies now.

The only possible hangup is doing a clean install with certain add-ons installed. For example, I have a USB 2.0 expansion card in my Dell PC. Just to keep the new hardware wizard or some crap from screwing up the install process, I just take out the card and run the installation procedure for it near last.

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Christopher Duvall
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 500
From: Denver, CO
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 11-12-2002 01:56 AM

I have dealt with some of these same problems being a PC person. However there has been one problem not mentioned at all on this thread...hardware. One of the most elusive issues with dealing with a crashing PC is a piece of malfuntioning hardware. The biggest offenders of this bunch is a bad motherboard. That alone can make it seem like you have other bad hardware, viruses, corrupted files and all of the above. Bad motherboards can also lead to other hardware failure. I once had a motherboard take out a video card and 256mb of memeory. The trick is trying to find out which piece is at fault.

My recommendation would be to completely wipe the hard-drive(s)and completely re-install everything from scratch. Make sure you have the most up-to-date drivers and software. Win2k or XPpro is a must to have since they are more stable than 98 or lower. If everything starts to crap out again after that, your hardware is causing the problems. Something may be conflicting with something else or it is just bad. That is where the fun begins. Good luck...

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 11-12-2002 03:45 AM

Might I recommend you do a clean install, then Ghost it immediately. I have cdrom images of my computers and servers (less those HUGE programs like Office). To resurrect a computer that is giving me fits, I save the email folder and re-Ghost it from the cdrom. From there all I have to do is load up those last couple of programs that were too big to fit on the image.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 11-12-2002 05:03 AM

I too keep an image of my system drive with all drivers and applications installed (though I use Drive Image).

Tip: if you're imaging a W2K system volume, run the 'sysprep' utility (downloadable from the MS website, search under 'sysprep') before creating the image. This basically tells it to do a plug-and-play search the next time it boots, so that if you've made any hardware changes before restoring the image they won't cause the OS to go unstable.

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