I only have one good PC at home for development and surfing in the internet. Sometimes I download free-/shareware from the internet and install this software on this PC. After doing this more than 10 times my Windows XP performance will be going down. For this problem I bought Norton Ghost (http://www.symantec.com) to save my Windows XP image to a DVD. If I now have problems with my Windows XP installation I put in the DVD, boot from it... and 10 minutes later I have a cleare Windows XP installation.

To have all my settings I have configured my Windows XP before creating the image: internet connections, outlook (.pst on my second hard disk), visual studio, my documents and desktop redirected to my second hard disk. On my first harddisk I have all my programs installed and on my second one all my documents and data.

I think this is the best way to install PCs. I found some IT people that install every program that is not installed by Windows XP on the second harddisk. But if you have a problem with your Windows XP installation you can start a new setup on the first harddisk, but you have to install all the other programs by hand.

What do you think about this? What is your best way to install desktop PCs and notebooks to be sure that if there is a problem with your Windows XP installation you save time to repair it?

4 Comments

• Chris said Monday, February 9, 2004 4:35:00 PM

  Do the same thing. A few issues does bug me though. Before restoring I have to copy the MyDocs/Favourities/Desktop/ etc. folders and after the restore "paste" them back into the new installation.
  Furthermore I find it hard to maintain the updated image. After a while 2-4 weeks the current installation gets so much out of synch that when restoring it feels like a lot of stuff is missing. I then try to install all the extra stuff immediately after a restore and recreate the image rom that...but then everything repeats itself a month later ;-) Guess I'll just have to live with that. Way better than doing a clean install from scratch!

• Richard Edwards said Monday, February 9, 2004 4:35:00 PM

  This is essentially the same way that myself and my colleagues set up our machines. We use PowerQuest DriveImage to do it though. I usually save a base setup to somewhere permanent, and then each week do a backup image to another drive so if I mess anything up during the week I can always go back to it.
  
  

• bertcord said Monday, February 9, 2004 5:35:00 PM

  yep. I do the same thing. I actaully store the mydocuments on a network drive (my raid 5 drive on my MP3 server)
  
  I reimage every weekend if I have made any changes over the week. Whenever I make a change, even a small one I write it into a text file. That way when the wekend comes I do the folowing.
  
  1. Re-image
  2. Make any changes that I had made over the week.
  3. Make new image
  
  The first couple of weeks I had a long list of changes but now I have not had to reimage for a few weeks.
  
  I also make sure I never but trail software on my image....just incase I want to "try" again
  
  bert

• Brian Desmond said Tuesday, February 10, 2004 5:20:00 AM

  In a single computer setup, what you're doing is okay. The problem occurs when you attempt to deploy that image to multiple machines - they'll have duplicate SIDs, amongst other things. If you want to/plan to do this, you'll need to "sysprep" the image before dumping it - sysprep is in the support.cab file in the support folder of your Windows CD>