| I do the same, except with one extra step which you might consider: use a disk imaging program (I use Norton Ghost) to avoid having to re-install from scratch. Basically, you make a disk image of a "clean" system when you first install the operating system. Then you to clean out the drive, simply use the disk image and rewrite it over the C: Drive. Voila! Instant re-install. There should be a lot of tutorials on how to do this, floating around the net. You can even build in more levels of disk images. For myself, I have a "Level 1" disk image (Windows only), "Level 2" (Windows + hardware drivers), "Level 3" (Windows + drivers + Office + Firefox + other applications). That way, there's a minimum amount of work whenever I re-ghost the drive - I can go back only to Level 3 if all the applications are still current, or I can go back a level if I want to (e.g. I want to upgrade my version of Office). It's not a lot of disk space for each image (my "clean" windows install is only about 600M compressed), so there's no reason not to keep multiple versions! |
Software for Newly Installed PC