Decent progress with my clean install of Windows
By Koalemos
@Asylum (47893)
Manchester, England
January 1, 2016 7:34pm CST
Due to the lack of decent television today and the quiet nature of Mylot, I decided to use the available time to reformat the hard drive on my laptop and completely reinstall everything. This is usually a fairly long process, but today I seem to have made quite good progress.
After totally deleting the partitions on the drive I installed Windows from a CD that I created during the Windows 10 upgrade process. After setting the icons, colour scheme and power options etcetera and updating Windows, I installed a few programs.
So far I have installed the Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection, Microsoft Office and Avast antivirus. I am currently scanning for updates again, after which I only have to install Aimersoft Video Converter and set up the emails and start menu tiles.
Once the updating has completed I will probably go to bed and leave the rest for tomorrow.
10 people like this
8 responses
@fishtiger58 (29819)
• Momence, Illinois
2 Jan 16
And....... your speaking English right??
1 person likes this
@fishtiger58 (29819)
• Momence, Illinois
2 Jan 16
@Asylum There you go, well I'm sure you did but it was still confusing. Taking off and putting back now that I can wrap my head around lol.
1 person likes this
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
2 Jan 16
@fishtiger58 The idea is to totally remove any form of data from the drive so that it is as clean as the day it was manufactured, then install Windows and the accompanying programs.
1 person likes this
@kaka135 (14994)
• Malaysia
2 Jan 16
Hope you'll get to use your clean and "new" laptop soon. I always try to avoid reinstalling my computer, as it'll take really long time to organize my files, and then reinstall Windows and other necessary programs. Good that you have almost got everything done. 
I like your caveman picture, it's so adorable! 
I like your caveman picture, it's so adorable! 1 person likes this
@garymarsh6 (23979)
• United Kingdom
3 Jan 16
I have yet to download Windows 10 I may do that in a week or two!
1 person likes this
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
3 Jan 16
When you download the files and run the installation, it will present you with a choice of upgrading the current version of Windows or making a clean install. You are likely to prefer upgrading in order to keep your files etcetera, but I would recommend choosing a clean install first.
This option will create an ISO file, which is simply a disk image and can be used to create a Windows 10 CD. Once it has created the ISO, copy it to a safe location for future use and you can then cancel the operation and run it again as an upgrade.
This way you will possess a Windows 10 CD if you ever want to reinstall.
@ElizabethWallace (12069)
• United States
2 Jan 16
Okay. Here I go exposing my ignorance. Why bother? Didn't you end up with everything you already had?
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@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
2 Jan 16
To a great degree yes I did. The main difference is that everything is fresh and there are no residual bits of problematic code left that do tend to develop over time.
A further incentive was that I initially upgraded to Windows 10 via the free Microsoft offer, so my installation was an overwrite of Windows 10 on Windows 7. The current system is a clean install of Windows 10 and far preferable.
I have always considered good practice to reinstall periodically and start anew.
1 person likes this
@ElizabethWallace (12069)
• United States
2 Jan 16
@Asylum That is because you both know how, and enjoy the process. For people like me, this would be a mistake.
1 person likes this
@Bluedoll (16770)
• Canada
2 Jan 16
This may sound almost paranoid but I don't always feel confident. Once while deleting partitions I found the untility didn't actually do it but said it did. Ouch, it lied and I was wounded for life. Low level formating I have confidence in, if it took a while, made a sound of hard drive activity, and verify's something was actually taking place.
Just thinking the trend now is to install only some files quickly but leave the rest? I like this way better a clean install, worth the time and then we do know we are starting completely fresh without doubts. mespeakageeka.
Just thinking the trend now is to install only some files quickly but leave the rest? I like this way better a clean install, worth the time and then we do know we are starting completely fresh without doubts. mespeakageeka.1 person likes this
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
2 Jan 16
I am intrigued by your mention of a partition not deleting because I have never known this. Back in the old days I would use a floppy boot disk to run FDISK and delete then recreate partitions, then later I would use the installation CD once the temporary files had been loaded into either a ramdrive or temp folder. Nowadays I no longer even bother to recreate partitions, but simply delete all partitions and select the unallocated space for installation.
If you have no confidence in the partition deletion, I would suggest selecting Repair My Computer once the temporary files have been loaded. This will enable you to run Diskpart from Command Prompt and run the Clean command on the specified drive. This will eradicate any form of partition or data from the drive completely.
Surely a low level format would take a long time with modern large capacity drives?
1 person likes this
