Comments on: When in Doubt, Reformat

By: Matt Bailey

Matt Bailey — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:40:09 +0000

I used to be on the 6 month nuke/reinstall plan. There’s nothing like collecting the same songs, games, and files over and over again. And this is why I partition the HD so everything non-OS is separated from the OS itself. Oddly enough, now that I’ve done this, I don’t have to reinstall. I’ve had the same version of XP on what is now my kid’s computer running stable for about 6 years now. But it’s about time. Videos don’t play correctly, and it takes nearly 5 full minutes for the computer to load up and be ready to go, hahaha.

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:21:25 +0000

Not that you do this very often, but if you have to do it more than twice, CT Update (or is it ctupdate?) is your friend. Google it. It has a front end that downloads all the service packs and updates, and a back end that you can put on CD, network, or flash media along with all the updates, then you can run one executable and it’ll install all of them. Run once, reboot, then run a second time just to be on the safe side.

I’m down to building about two systems a year, but even at that rate ctupdate saves me a bunch of time.