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Groups > alt.comp.os.windows-10 > #182087
| From | Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | alt.comp.os.windows-10 |
| Subject | Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations |
| Date | 2025-02-07 16:48 +0000 |
| Organization | A noiseless patient Spider |
| Message-ID | <vo5dgq$3j3co$1@dont-email.me> (permalink) |
| References | <vo2i13$307r8$1@dont-email.me> <vo3nfb$36plg$1@dont-email.me> |
On 2025-02-07 01:26, John C. wrote:
>
> I am now giving serious consideration to simply wiping the drive, and
> then installing Windows 7 on it. Then I will install all my drivers and
> programs, do all the tweaking and adjusting and I will know that it will
> all work.
>
> Then I will downgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10.
As I've had reason to state so often over the last couple of days that
people are probably getting bored of it, this is what I did around
2014-15, and it's been the foundation of all my builds since. My
penultimate day job before I retired was creating first the W9x and then
the W2k builds that were used on every PC throughout the UK offices of a
well known accounting firm, from memory I think that was some teens or
tens of thousands of PCs. I'd create the build, put it through
independent testing, and, when they passed it, the Ghost image file
would go to our suppliers to be put on every PC of the particular make
and model it was designed for.
I used this experience to create a webpage describing how to create
Windows images - it's still up there on my site ...
www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/Windows/WindowsImageBuilding.html
... but is too full of the nitty gritty details of the time to be much
worth reading now. However the PRINCIPLES that I followed for W7 were
exactly the same, the overwhelming ones being:
+ Keep things as simple as possible while still giving you what you
want in the way of functionality.
Don't install freebie software supplied with a particular piece of
hardware unless it is worthwhile in its own right and would still be
useful in the absence of that hardware, because hardware dies, but, to
be most useful to you in repaying the time invested creating it, the
build will need to live on. The Nero example is one such - in its day
I used it a great deal, but I never use it now, so I installed it for
W2k/XP, but not for W7, and there's always ImgBurn, which is more
specific in its functionality and I suspect therefore puts less hooks
into the system, if I should need something like that.
Particularly, where possible avoid things that appear in the System
Tray, things like netcard drivers that install an unnecessary program to
monitor your net connection, Windows has its own icon that does that
anyway, or printer drivers that launch a monitoring program that runs
permanently in the background. How often do you need actually to print
anything these days? Not often, so, if you need a monitoring program at
all, you only need it while actually printing, not running all the time
consuming resources. Scanners are another example of hardware that
loads a service &/or system tray program, but it may not be easy or
desirable to do without them
The other types of resident programs to avoid are things like fast
start options for software. Adobe PDF viewer is an example of software
that used to launch, and perhaps still does, a resident program on boot
to preload all the libraries necessary to view a PDF, so that, if and
when you do actually view a PDF, it appears to load very quickly, but,
unless you really do read a lot of PDFs, all the rest of the time it is
consuming resources for nothing, thus making the entire OS more sluggish
than it need be, in particular when loading and drawing the Desktop
after log on. Office programs do this as well. Most probably, you
should disable such options where possible.
However, what to do in any one particular case depends on your usage
and is down to you, I can only give general, not specific, advice.
+ Separate data from OS and programs. In the firm we used to keep
all the user's data in a separate folder off the root, so that when a
user upgraded their PC, we could just copy the folder from the old one
to the new. This meant when creating the builds going through all the
installed software altering the settings to offer default save and open
locations within this directory structure, rather than in the user's
profile directory.
I do the same except that all my data is on a different partition.
I make the OS partition as small as possible while still allowing the OS
to run well, about 64-80GB for Windows 7/10/11 depending on the amount
of RAM in the system (the more RAM, the greater the size of the
hibernation file C:\hibefil.sys), and having search indexing completely
disabled as IME it is useless and just wastes runtime resources and
consuming unjustifiably huge amounts of disk space to accomplish next to
nothing that is genuinely useful. This means there is nothing,
literally nothing, of my own on the OS partition, and I can replace W7
OS with a W10 or W11 OS without affecting my data at all.
HTHs
--
Fake news kills!
I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk
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Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-06 06:46 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-02-06 09:26 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam> - 2025-02-06 12:00 -0500
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2025-02-06 17:59 +0000
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "Alan K." <alan@invalid.com> - 2025-02-06 13:47 -0500
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations ...w¡ñ§±¤ñ <winstonmvp@gmail.com> - 2025-02-06 14:16 -0700
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-06 17:26 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-06 17:40 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-02-06 21:11 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2025-02-07 12:59 +0000
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "Allan Higdon" <allanh@vivaldi.net> - 2025-02-07 07:24 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam> - 2025-02-07 10:57 -0500
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-02-07 16:40 +0000
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-07 15:24 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-02-06 21:12 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-07 04:17 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-02-07 08:18 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-07 15:31 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-02-07 19:10 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations ...w¡ñ§±¤ñ <winstonmvp@gmail.com> - 2025-02-07 09:37 -0700
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-03-02 05:42 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-03-02 14:50 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-03-03 06:19 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-03-03 14:26 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-03-04 04:04 -0800
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-03-04 11:53 -0600
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2025-02-07 16:48 +0000
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations Mr Xi Ji Ping <ping@china.cn> - 2025-02-07 03:00 +0000
Re: Fresh reinstall and file associations "John C." <r9jmg0@yahoo.com> - 2025-02-07 04:19 -0800
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