May your computer ever increase in speed without cost_____!!!!!!!!!

If all your OT postings are this good, keep 'em coming. That's a keeper!

I've archived that article plus several of the others referred to in the links at the beginning.

Thanks riredale. An extremely useful post.

Serena

Buried? Obtuse?

It asks if you want a fresh install or repair an existing one.

I use it all the time...mainly because I never remember to make an ADR disk. :^)

GenJerDan, have you checked out the referenced article? You might have missed something.

I read it. It's pretty much what I just did last Friday.

I just don't understand why it's slanted as being a hidden thing. Anyone who decides to reinstall XP because their machine is screwed up will get that screen asking if they wanted to repair the current installation or put in a fresh one. Kinda blatant, imo.

Is it because it's not in the instructions on the box?

As I was reading through the procedure on the link the expanded pictures froze up my computer and ended with the "send message to Microsoft" message. So much for that procedure.

JJK

Riredale,

"This might be old news to many of you, but it was a revelation to me."

To Me Too. Thanks for posting.

Most of us have encountered procedures that are supposed to work, but don't easily work out that way. {See the current Bryce thread}.

Your feedback as a Vegas User makes me more willing to wade into such a "renovation" of my Op System, if ever necessary.

Hello all

I had one problem doing this procedure. After getting to the desktop
everthing was just as the article described, but when it came to installing service pack 2 I get an error and SP2 would not install.
This could be a problem because some sofware works better with SP2. I tried to start with SP1 thinking mabe I need to go in sequencial order and still it did'nt work. Maybe this it not a problem
for the XP versions that comes with SP2. With out SP2 some of my programs are running a little bugy.

Maybe this is why this procedure is not out front because it's not good in some cases.

Well! Back to the drawing board.


ZION

Thanks R,

The big question for me...did you see the option to "press F6 to install 3rd party drivers"? (I think that's how the message reads.) I'm going to have to do the same thing later this week and since I'm running an nvidia RAID array on my boot disc, I need to make sure the drivers are installed.

****************************************************************************

Your link is a good visual walkthrough explaining the info from this knowledgebase article.. (In fact, I write the info week kind of walkthrough for a living. It was oh-so-familiar. :-) )

It took a tiny bit of digging but the KB article was referenced in the link Fldave provided in your other thread on this topic. See "Method 2" in the article.

Of course the problem with the kb article is that they're trying to cover more than one situation. On the other hand, they give a few warnings that might be useful - like that you'l lose your restore points, and that you should make sure you have a third party driver disc ready. But it's confusing whther these warnings apply to the repair scenario.

Rob Mack

G-,

The problem for a lot of people is that you don't know you can do a repair installation until far down the road. It would be better to let people know about it somewhere around the first screen. Otherwise, people spend a lot of time in fear that they're at risk of doing a new clean install.

I had similar problems installing the nvidia raid drivers. Even after selecting the drivers of my floppy, I wasn't sure if I should just let setup finish or if I should stop at that point. It's not clear.

I write this sort of stuff for a living and get lots of questions from people who don't know much. You learn to cover the bases as clearly as possible.

Rob

You should look at Lanza's links about creating a slipstream disc. This is a method of making a new install disc that incorporates the updates.

Rob Mack

I have used this procedure before and it works well. I stumbled on it by accident. I was about to do a full clean install when I saw the offer to repair my install so I thought, what the heck, it can’t hurt. Like the article said you would think it would be more obvious how to do this.

~jr

Although I've seen the option, I've never tried it because of problems trying to "repair" OS in earlier Winders.

Also, as John Meyer says there are some links to some other great articles! A wealth of info in one post!

Look at the "slipstream" article about installing XP and all the service packs together. That's something else I've heard about but never found a "how-to" for.

Thanks again.

While this is interesting - it does absolutely nothing to assist in cleaning out a completely bloated PC. After months of working...installing...uninstalling...downloading...uppacking - the XP environment gets cluttered beyond belief. No amount of repairing will help get rid of this.

Also - if doing a massive changes like changing out a motherboard and installing a new CPU - important items like new CPU drivers (in the case of AMD)...a new HAL (Hardware abstraction layer)....etc etc need to installed in a specific order via a "clean" bare metal install to work properly.

It is much easier to just install a perfect clean XP with all drivers and the basics ready to go - image the drive and stash it away. I do this at any major hardware change...and it takes literally 4-8 minutes to have a freshly installed environement ready to go. Without the bloat.

I have used the repair option, but I screwed it up one time. I had slipstreamed SP2 into XP, but when I did the repair, I put in the disk for XP with no SP2. That was a real pain.

If I do major changes in hardware, I always do a clean install. The computer then is not filled with old drivers and registry entries.

Dave T2

If I do major changes in hardware, I always do a clean install. The computer then is not filled with old drivers and registry entries.

But how do you get all your apps and all your personal settings back the way you want them? It takes me several days to do all this. As I get older, I hate to spend my remaining days feeding installation disks into a computer, and trying to remember the dozens and dozens of tweaks that I have to do to get the computer to perform well.

John,

There are only about 6 tweaks that matter to improving the XP environment (which I will gladly share if you want). If you are running a fairly modern machine - XP really doesn't need much more. Actually - if you don't mind sharing - what exactly are your "dozens and dozens" of tweaks?

Installing apps should also not take days - maybe a few hours but how many apps are you wotrking with? However - no matter how long it takes - do it once to a super clean install, image the C:\ drive (apps and all) and you are all set.

I am curious as to what you are spending so much time on tho :)

Cheers!

VP

My guru buddy has used Norton Go Back with the new stuff and he says they upgraded it so that it would work. He demo'd it for me by deleting 10 key windows files for real then hit the go back and in 9 minutes everything was as it was and the deleted files were back in place. The first thing he does now is install it on all his clients computers so he doesn't have to re-install everything piece by piece after they get it full of about 75 viruses. He hates Norton but swears by this new stuff. As long as the updated Go Back is within a couple weeks of the problem their is no problem with loosing tons of data. If you update the Go Back with a Virus present it will go back of course with the virus still there. Go Back can be installed after everything else is installed first. I think it's called Go Back but I might be wrong.

JJK

Johnmeyer

LIke you say, it takes a while, but I have done it so many times, I know right where to go for the settings.

My biggest problem is I will forget to save my FAVORITES. These are always a pain to find.

Dave T2

I am curious as to what you are spending so much time on tho :)

I guess the way I phrased it, you probably think I was talking just about speed. That certainly is part of it. Off the top of my head, here are the tweaks having to do with performance (including boot time, memory usage, general clutter, etc.):

1. Turn off indexing, not just per drive, but also in the policies.

2. Turn off Messenger (security issues). There are also many other security issues that must be checked, although SP2, configures many things better than SP1.

3. Verify DMA for all drives. Make sure drives are all set for Optimize Performance.

I don't have too much time for this post, but there are many others, including:

Automatic Updates
Computer Browser
Error Reporting Service
Help and Support
Indexing Service
Messenger
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Performance Logs and Alerts
Remote Registry
Secondary Logon
Task Scheduler

Then there are the dozens of important preferences:

1. For LCD displays, configure to get the screen so it is readable. This includes the registry tweak to get IE to display images at larger sizes.

2. Get Explorer to display in Classic view. Same thing for Explorer Search, and also Control Panel.

3. Set up network shares, including proper permissions (which can be a bear).

4. Install and configure all the applications (many days of work with the number of applications that I run).

5. Swap the Ctrl key and Caps lock key. I "grew up" with the original keyboard layout of the IBM PC, and use "Wordstar" shortcuts for everything -- even for editing inside of Vegas. The Ctrl key needs to be just to the left of the A key for this to work. This swapping requires a fairly exotic registry hack (but it works perfectly).

Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it doesn't begin to get into issues such as changing Windows defaults to point to the D: drive (since I partition all computers so that data is on the D: partition, which makes image backup/restore simple and small, and also makes data backup much easier). TweakUI makes this much simpler than it used to be, but each application has to be changed to point to the correct directories.

John,

Thanks for the update. Sounds like you have your hands full.

However - many of the tweaks (performance, speed, display etc) can be solved with the latest version of Autopatcher. The August 2006 Full release does pretty much all of these for you like Messenger, Remote Registry, Secondary logon, LCD Cleartype, Explorer/Control Panel classic views etc etc (and a whole lot more that you don't have listed. Others you have listed here have a nominal or non-existant effect on anything.

While I run primarily an audio based shop over here - these should benefit anyone running Vegas - my 3 absolute essential tweaks now after spending time with the latest Sound On Sound mag (Sept 2006) are these:

1. Change Processor Scheduling to 'Background Services'
2. Switch Off Power Schemes
3. Disable System Sounds

Top 7 still useful tweaks include:

4. Disable Taskbar Auto-hide (this one is usually automatic anyway)
5a. Turn Off System Restore on all drives
5b. Turn Off Indexing Service on all drives (not sure what you mean by policies in your description)
6. Turn Off Automatic Updates
7. Disable Hibernation
8. Disable Fast User Switching
9. Set Menu Speed to 'Maximum'
10. Completely shutdown the security center service (Nicely tuned hardware firewall over here - so no need for this)

Before this weekends build - I used to really obsess over trying to squeeze ever last ounce of performance out of my rig by tweaking the thing to death....builds in the last few months took well over 8 hours...

This past Saturday I did a complete bare metal reinstall of XP (including writing zeros to my install drive) plus my entire software studio environment (including all current Windows Updates, tweaks etc with Autopatcher, apps, software authorizations, VSTi, everything) in just over 3 hours. Imaging took 18 minutes. Restoring that image (should I ever need to) will take 9 minutes.

Bottom line was that the Sound On Sound article was right on the money. My current machine (AMD X2 4400+ with ASUS A8V Deluxe and 2GB RAM) has never run better or faster. I didn't really need to try to squeeze ever last ounce out anymore because most of this low level stuff has little to no effect on anything. Plus it drastically cut my tweaking time....these 10 take about 7 minutes to complete.

You sound like a perfect candidate for Autopatcher, a good registry script (that can perform all of your esoteric tweaks for you), and finally a copy of the latest Acronis TrueImage so you can build your machine up perfectly one time and then save that whole image for use whenever to modd strikes you for a fresh outlook.

Trust me - I cannot describe the feeling in terms of saving time when I restore a completely ready image to the machine if needed.

Cheers!