I am trying to figure out what is the least painful and if I really should do a clean Windows 7 install
My computer is about 4 years old and I have never done anything for upgrades but I am now looking at getting a new graphics card and some more memory. I have been getting some open GL crashes lately with the current video card and latest drivers but rolling them back to an earlier version seems to have fixed it for the time being. I have tried registry cleaners but there always seems to be a lot of junk left.
What has me concerned is the following
1. Reinstalling Norton Anti Virus...this always seems to be a pain in the ass
2. DRM for Battlefront will I have to find and re install all the codes for my battlefront games (I have all the CMBN and CMSF modules)
3. Steam games - how painful is it to put them all back on?
4. Mods for my games - I have sort of saved them to a folder but they are sort of scattered about as well. I would have to re-install them and I have a lot of Mods for CMBN
5. iTunes (I have a terrabyte of music saved on an external hard drive) but do i need to save/backup the library?
6. All the Windows 7 upgrades service packs and patches needing to be applied
All in all I am trying to sort out if the pain of a clean reinstall is worth it since I am sure the system is more flaky then when I bought it but on the other hand it is not crashing all the time either.
What do you guys think?
Thanks
Con
Get rid of the Norton shit and have a clean install
I just ponied up for another year of Norton so I am stuck with it until Aug 2014. I never really had a lot of problems with Norton and other programs its more having to reinstall it that has me concerned
Thanks
Con
Norton is crawling really deep into your system...and it's not better than some freeware antivirus proggys that don't do that...
do a clean install of everything.
find all the current drivers that you need and put them on a usb stick.
Steam is easier then Mirth on Friday night.
current game mods should also be saved to a usb stick.
no idea about itunes. Ive never had much luck with it.
your looking at around 3 hours from start to finish but the difference will be amazing.
.
^^^ QFT!
Ive had a 500mb WD external for years thats saved my ass on a number of occasions.
like when hamsterhubtube goes down. ::)
Quote from: GDS_Starfury on October 30, 2013, 04:55:00 PM
like when hamsterhubtube goes down. ::)
I saw what you did there...
Quote from: GDS_Starfury on October 30, 2013, 03:54:01 PM
do a clean install of everything.
find all the current drivers that you need and put them on a usb stick.
Steam is easier then Mirth on Friday night.
current game mods should also be saved to a usb stick.
no idea about itunes. Ive never had much luck with it.
your looking at around 3 hours from start to finish but the difference will be amazing.
I'd also vote to do a clean install, but 3 hours is a very optimistic, best case scenario. Plan to do it on a weekend and spend most of a day doing it. Trust me, I just did a 'simple' upgrade from OSX 10.6.8 to 10.9 (OSX Mavericks) and it's taken me a week to sort out all the issues. I've had Windows installs/upgrades go sideways too.
And
nothing is easier than me on a Friday night. ;)
Well, I did a clean install on my NB with W7 recently...copied all files I needed to my external HDD and then re-installed W7...the whole process was about 1h including copying everything from the external HDD back to the HDD on my NB.
Quote from: mirth on October 30, 2013, 05:49:11 PM
Trust me, I just did a 'simple' upgrade from OSX 10.6.8 to 10.9 (OSX Mavericks) and it's taken me a week to sort out all the issues.
What were the biggest issues with the 10.9 upgrade? I was thinking of making the switch on my iMac soon.
Quote from: Grimnirsson on October 30, 2013, 05:59:18 PM
Well, I did a clean install on my NB with W7 recently...copied all files I needed to my external HDD and then re-installed W7...the whole process was about 1h including copying everything from the external HDD back to the HDD on my NB.
Hey, it can go right sometimes too. Plan for the worst, then when it goes smoothly enjoy a couple of beers with your free time!
I have say though, considering the applications Con listed - Norton AV, Battlefront DRM, Steam, iTunes w/ a large music library, I'd expect at least a few hurdles to overcome :P
filthy mac people....
you smell of patchouil and drop fleas from your unwashed hippy bodies.
be gone misanthropes!!!
^Actually, I go both ways. And I've been known to flirt with a Linux distro or two on the side... 8)
Quote from: Staggerwing on October 30, 2013, 06:34:49 PM
Quote from: mirth on October 30, 2013, 05:49:11 PM
Trust me, I just did a 'simple' upgrade from OSX 10.6.8 to 10.9 (OSX Mavericks) and it's taken me a week to sort out all the issues.
What were the biggest issues with the 10.9 upgrade? I was thinking of making the switch on my iMac soon.
The install got borked somehow. It would recognize my OSX HDD partition. Disk Utility told me it was corrupt and needed to be repaired. Try to repair, tells me it can't be repaired. At that point, if I tried to reboot it would start the Mavericks installer again. Next I tried to restore from an old Time Machine backup, but that wouldn't recognize the OSX partition either. The laughable part was that my WinXP Boot Camp partition was fine and I could still boot into that without a problem.
After many hours and attempts at various things, I ended reformatting the OSX partition and then I was able to restore from Time Machine. Problem is that backup was almost a year old and it took me a few more hours to get things back to something close to what I had. First thing I did after that was to make another Time Machine backup (which required me to reformat the Time Machine drive because that had issues of it's own. I was lucky to get the old backup off it).
Anyway my second attempt at installing Mavericks worked, but there are minor things I've been tweaking since (for example Mavericks doesn't come with Java or Flash and actually removes them from your machine during the upgrade).
Oh and now that Mavericks is installed, my XP partition is giving me problems. I haven't even tried to figure that out yet.
Is your bootcamp Win partition your primary Win device or do you have a separate Win box for gaming/etc?
Quote from: Staggerwing on October 30, 2013, 07:10:27 PM
Is your bootcamp Win partition your primary Win device or do you have a separate Win box for gaming/etc?
That's it for my Win gaming right now. It's worked okay for most of the games I own but I made it too small, just 40 GB. At some point, I'm going to get Win 7. When I do, I'll create a new Boot Camp partition with more space. Or I'll just bite the bullet and get a new machine just for running Windows.
Part of the reason, I did the Mavericks upgrade was because I recently purchased Arkham City on Steam. It will run on OSX, but not 10.6.8, so the free upgrade to Mavericks seemed perfect.
you disgust me right now hippy.
Quote from: GDS_Starfury on October 30, 2013, 07:33:18 PM
you disgust me right now hippy.
And remember, I'm also a vegetarian.
Thanks for the advice I might have another solution that I wanted to run by you.
What if I purchase an SSD drive and install Windows 7 on it. I would then delete all the windows folders and files on the old HD drive but leave it otherwise intact with all my other programs and folders intact. Would this work or would you still recommend a complete clean reinstall even with putting in a new SSD that has the operating system on it?
Thanks
Con
PS Ageing Hippies views are welcome just wipe your grimy hobbit feet at the door
That's not a bad idea. I'm guessing the ssd will only have windows on it.
Yes I would only use it for Windows and boot up
What about all the registry pointers or whatever they're called that those other programs need to function? Some of those programs will probably have their roots deep into the Windows install itself as well. Time for a real computer pro to chime in here...
You would have to reinstall the programs. Some older games/programs will run without the registry entries but 99% of anything even remotely new will refuse to run and will prompt you to reinstall.
Since you state that you want to get a SSD drive, then I would:
1. Put a folder in the root of C and call it "drivers". Download every current driver that you can for the hardware in your PC. Windows 7 is somewhat good at finding missing drivers but you will of course need to be connected to the net, so at the very least, make sure that you have the correct driver for your NIC card. Dell is very easy to get all the drivers for, just go to dell.com and support and then enter the service tag# on your PC. HP is pretty straight forward as well. Generic PC's or ones that are home built can be a bit more difficult. driverguide.com is an excellent service if you get absolutely stuck finding a driver after reinstalling windows and exhausting all other methods.
Also, Back Up Your Windows Settings to this folder by going to the start menu and typing in "Windows Easy Transfer" and then follow the prompts. It should let you back it up to the same drive and if so, select the "drivers" folder for convenience. Else, have a flash drive handy for it.
2. Purchase a cheap USB to SATA drive kit. I use mine all of the time for "dead" harddrives (you can often access them long enough with these kits to get data off of them). An example is http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dd1a/ (http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dd1a/) (there's several brands, that just came up in a search but should give you the idea of what to look for). Try to find a kit that can use an optional power source, i.e., it has a plug for the wall. Often the USB alone won't be enough to juice up the drive so the extra power from the wall gets you over that.
3. Take out the old SATA drive and put in the SSD drive. Install Win7 and restore your saved settings that you backed up. Check device manager to see what devices are missing drivers.
4. Connect the SATA drive to the kit and plug it in to a USB port. It will show up as an external drive. Copy over your "divers" folder and install drivers. Recheck device manager. Hopefully you can get online now.
5. Activate Windows. You may have to call M$ and go through the automated licensing service. It's easy enough to do. Run Windows updates. Come back in a couple of hours.
6. Make sure that you unhide "hidden" system folders.
7. Reinstall programs and games. One neat program that will help you to quickly install "common" programs is Ninite: https://ninite.com/ (https://ninite.com/)
8. From your old drive, overwrite the program folders for games that you just installed with what you had on the old drive. This will restore mods and other tweaks (usually) so that the game will run as it did before (caveat: you'll need to restore your 'saved games' and 'appdata' folders as well (appdata is a hidden system folder so again, make sure that you are set to view hidden folders).
9. Copy over the documents folder, desktop and any other stuff that you want to transfer including C:\Users\yourusername\Music\iTunes\ for itunes (default directory).
10. Disconnect the old drive and store it in a static free bag in a shoebox and put it in your closet. You'll dig it out again no doubt to look for something else that you forgot.
Google "backup and reinstall windows 7" for more tips. Example: http://lifehacker.com/5983652/how-to-do-a-clean-install-of-windows-without-losing-your-files-settings-and-tweaks (http://lifehacker.com/5983652/how-to-do-a-clean-install-of-windows-without-losing-your-files-settings-and-tweaks)
Wow GJK
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. It looks like it is a painful (relatively compared to getting a colonoscopy maybe not so much painful) procedure no matter what I do.
Reading you answer then the question becomes is what are the advantages of putting your OS on an SSD?
Thanks again
Con
If you Mac users are using Parallels, that might be forgivable. Like a hippy that takes a bath once a month.
'Bootcamp' sounds more manly than 'Parallels'.
Quote from: Staggerwing on November 14, 2013, 08:12:13 PM
'Bootcamp' sounds more manly than 'Parallels'.
and we Mac users can use all the help we can get in that regard.
When I started at Academy's corporate office, I had no idea what was in store for me. When I got to my cubicle/desk the first morning, there was a Macbook Pro sitting there. I'd not worked with a Mac since 1984. It was an interesting year.
Quote from: Con on November 14, 2013, 02:35:32 PM
Wow GJK
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. It looks like it is a painful (relatively compared to getting a colonoscopy maybe not so much painful) procedure no matter what I do.
Reading you answer then the question becomes is what are the advantages of putting your OS on an SSD?
Thanks again
Con
The biggest advantage is the stability of the hardware. Current HDD's are notorious for going bad. When I was working primarily IT, the issues in order were 1) malware/virus 2) PSU (power supplies) closely followed by HDD's (hard disk drives). The little arm inside of them breaks off or the platters become scratched from a misaligned control arm and they start to develop bad sectors that can't be read or written to that spread like cancer. The arm breaking or crashing against the side of the drive (aka "the click of death") was very common. SSD's are like large thumb drives with no moving parts. That and their read/seek times are greatly enhanced over the traditional disk drive.
Many advocate splitting the large drive in to two partitions. The original reason for doing this was with the older DOS based Windows, partitions over a certain size lost many megabytes of data because DOS simply couldn't handle those larger partitions. Nowadays, some split the drive in to two partitions and put just Windows on the smaller "C" partition and all data/games on the "D" partition. This way, if Windows buggers up, all of your programs/games DATA is safe, though you would still have to reinstall them as outlined above. Personally, I don't see much advantage to that these days, especially if you go with a SSD (the other option was two physical drives, one for Windows, one for the rest. If by chance the Windows drive died, you could still access the other drive - again, not an issue so much with a SSD). One problem too with two partitions is invariably, the user would make the Windows partition too small and found out that soon their C partition was filling up. This happened because by default programs want to install to the C partition and they would forget to manually change it to the D partition when installing programs. The C would fill up and they'd lose room for their virtual memory (SWAP drive, which by default would be on the C drive) and then suddenly Windows is running slow as a turtle. Too much hassle for me, just keep it a single C partition.
Quote from: GJK on November 12, 2013, 12:47:46 PM
You would have to reinstall the programs. Some older games/programs will run without the registry entries but 99% of anything even remotely new will refuse to run and will prompt you to reinstall.
Since you state that you want to get a SSD drive, then I would:
1. Put a folder in the root of C and call it "drivers". Download every current driver that you can for the hardware in your PC. Windows 7 is somewhat good at finding missing drivers but you will of course need to be connected to the net, so at the very least, make sure that you have the correct driver for your NIC card. Dell is very easy to get all the drivers for, just go to dell.com and support and then enter the service tag# on your PC. HP is pretty straight forward as well. Generic PC's or ones that are home built can be a bit more difficult. driverguide.com is an excellent service if you get absolutely stuck finding a driver after reinstalling windows and exhausting all other methods.
Also, Back Up Your Windows Settings to this folder by going to the start menu and typing in "Windows Easy Transfer" and then follow the prompts. It should let you back it up to the same drive and if so, select the "drivers" folder for convenience. Else, have a flash drive handy for it.
2. Purchase a cheap USB to SATA drive kit. I use mine all of the time for "dead" harddrives (you can often access them long enough with these kits to get data off of them). An example is http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dd1a/ (http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dd1a/) (there's several brands, that just came up in a search but should give you the idea of what to look for). Try to find a kit that can use an optional power source, i.e., it has a plug for the wall. Often the USB alone won't be enough to juice up the drive so the extra power from the wall gets you over that.
3. Take out the old SATA drive and put in the SSD drive. Install Win7 and restore your saved settings that you backed up. Check device manager to see what devices are missing drivers.
4. Connect the SATA drive to the kit and plug it in to a USB port. It will show up as an external drive. Copy over your "divers" folder and install drivers. Recheck device manager. Hopefully you can get online now.
5. Activate Windows. You may have to call M$ and go through the automated licensing service. It's easy enough to do. Run Windows updates. Come back in a couple of hours.
6. Make sure that you unhide "hidden" system folders.
7. Reinstall programs and games. One neat program that will help you to quickly install "common" programs is Ninite: https://ninite.com/ (https://ninite.com/)
8. From your old drive, overwrite the program folders for games that you just installed with what you had on the old drive. This will restore mods and other tweaks (usually) so that the game will run as it did before (caveat: you'll need to restore your 'saved games' and 'appdata' folders as well (appdata is a hidden system folder so again, make sure that you are set to view hidden folders).
9. Copy over the documents folder, desktop and any other stuff that you want to transfer including C:\Users\yourusername\Music\iTunes\ for itunes (default directory).
10. Disconnect the old drive and store it in a static free bag in a shoebox and put it in your closet. You'll dig it out again no doubt to look for something else that you forgot.
Google "backup and reinstall windows 7" for more tips. Example: http://lifehacker.com/5983652/how-to-do-a-clean-install-of-windows-without-losing-your-files-settings-and-tweaks (http://lifehacker.com/5983652/how-to-do-a-clean-install-of-windows-without-losing-your-files-settings-and-tweaks)
Hi GJK
I am starting the process of putting in a new SSD drive as my windows 7 boot up drive. reading through your advice I have a question. If I dont intend on removing the old HD drive but just renaming it (ie C to D etc) does this make it more simple? I wouldnt have to reinstal the programs just find them and then put new shortcuts on the desktop and the start bar right? What would this do for itunes where the library is under C/users/yourname...etc. Would I need to recreate that on the new SSD drive?
Thanks
Conrad