Wiping your laptop and starting again Do people still do this to get it working faster or has windows improved so its not needed? I used to have to do it at least 3 times a year back in the dark days but mines started acting strangly after 18 months. Wipe or not to wipe
Depends how well your machine is protected from all the crap that gets filtered down via your net connection... I personnally use firefox with the noscript plugin for safe browsing so not to pick up viruses, spam, and random popups.... I suppose everyone has their own opinion on this but I used to wipe my laptop every so often, once or twice a year I reckon..... Mine just gets so bogged down and full of shit over time from downloading stuff but these days (and have done for a long time now), I run a blank operating system with vmware workstation on top. That way I have a load of virtual machines at my disposal for different purposes and twatting about with, then just roll them back, snapshot them, and copy them to other PC's when and where I feel like.... they're pretty much hardware independent....a totally portable O/S.... I suppose it all depends if you use your machine for games since VM's don't do 3d graphics that well..... god you can tell i'm a proper I.T. geek like! you'll need a beefy machine with 2gb ram or more and a decent chip..... if you google hard enough you'll find vmware workstation for errrrmmm.... free if you get my meaning..... but back to your original post wiping is always the cleanest way to get rid of un-wanted nasty's.... you can use as many spybots and spyware removers as you like but you'll never get rid of everything 100%.... it's just a real hassle re-installing everything hence my approach above....
To put it into perspective, my quad core windows 7 pc (used to have Vista) has never felt like it needs to be formatted to speed things up again (there have been a few other reasons though ), but my netbook with XP is already showing the signs now that the hard drive is over half full, and I've only had it for a couple of months. I'm not going to format it because it's not an issue yet, but I'm not sure whether it's down to the OS used, or the hardware specs.
does anyone have a Acer laptop? The drive is spilt into 3 partions with one containing a factory setting of the drive. I dont know how to go about resetting it tho
I do it every now and then and it always sorts my computer out. If it used to be fast and now it isn't, it probably needs a formatt. Whack everything on a the secondary partitions and then make a note of which partition contain windows. Insert Windows disk, restart and it should load the disk and ask if you want to format. format the windows drive only, install windows onto that drive and then follow the rest of the steps.
i cured myself my laptop died a few days ago, just looping then crashing. It crashed just before the windows network logon box. Safe Mode and every other mode just went back to windows booting and the usual crash then restart. Couldnt do fuck all hence my purchase on W7. Is there any key press i could have used to break into DOS ?
