Reinstalling OS

[SkippyK]

I've been running XP Pro on my home PC for a couple of years, and its now getting a little bit slow, so I was thinking of wiping the drive and reinstalling everything.

Only thing is, I've obviously spent a lot of time and effort setting up things the way I like them, and I want to lose as little as possible. I'm already running Belarc advisor which tells me exactly what I have installed software wise and what the serial no's etc are for each, but I just wondered if anyone had any useful tips for this kind of situation.

Also, what is the general concensus? One partition for the hard disk or several? At the minute, my hard disk is split into (I think) 6 partitions, each of which I use for a specific purpose. However, reformatting will obviously give me the ability to rethink my strategy

TIA

 

[gbaughma]

I've been running XP Pro on my home PC, and it's still screaming and I haven't reinstalled it at all.

However, there are things that I do to maintain it.

1) Turn down your internet cache. I set mine to about 20 MB.
2) Use a good registry cleaner; un-installing software usually leaves crap behind.
3) Defrag. Defrag. Defrag.
4) Clean out your temp directory

Find a good housekeeping utility; one that will look for orphaned DLL's, orphaned registry entries, *.bak files, *.tmp files, etc.

Also, look at some xp tweaks... turn off services that you know you won't use. Take a look at

http://www.tweakxp.com

In the old days, (98-ish) a wipe/reinstall was a good thing, because 98 didn't really have the tools available to clean up after itself. However, I haven't found this to be the issue in XP. But, XP has to be reminded to pick up it's toys and put them back in the toybox when finished.



Just my $0.02

"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg

 

[SkippyK]

Thanks for that Greg

What would you recommend for housekeeping and reg cleaning?

I also do get an occasional "Blue screen of death". This was another reason I was considering the clean sweep, but is it worthwhile trying to identify the exact reason for this?

Thanks again