Have you had any system instability issues or random crashes?
How often do you reinstall Windows?
- Thread starter Cromulent
- Start date
Soldato
None at all until I had a hardware failure.
Man of Honour
Nothing left now unless someone can give me some things to look for!
I've long since found and removed entities relating to the Vista sidebar widget system, remember that?
Among a bunch of other stuff!
Man of Honour
No stability issues here either and I've upgraded both Mobo and CPU a number of times. Windows 10 is very good with new hardware, it knows and will isolate and remove previous system hardware ready for the new ones. Obviously you want to help the process by pre-uninstalling device drivers you know are old before the swap just to keep things clean.
Soldato
never had to install windows after 1st install. I make a clone after the 1st install with essential programs and drivers and window updates then if I need to redo windows I use the clone, takes about 4 mins with nvme drives, once clone is installed I make a new clone after I've updated drivers and windows.
I actually did a fresh install on my personal PC yesterday as I wanted to switch boot drives and figured I might as well do it fresh. Downloaded 2004 onto a USB stick.
It was all done and fully up-to-date in 10-15 minutes. I was a little bit lost, I'd planned a whole afternoon to sort it out.
Can't say I miss the old days!
It was all done and fully up-to-date in 10-15 minutes. I was a little bit lost, I'd planned a whole afternoon to sort it out.
Can't say I miss the old days!
You may have figured this out by now, but since it never got properly answered in detail, here's how I do it:
1. After your next fresh install, clone your OS drive after installing all your "must have" apps on it and setting it up how you like it. You should have all your static data (pics, vids, Steam) on separate drives/partitions
2. Use macrium reflect or another cloning tool to clone the OS drive with all your critical apps and keep the image on a backup drive
3. Ideally you'd install non "must have" apps to a separate drive (more on this later)
4. When it's time to refresh everything, back up important app data (game saves) and other files saved to the OS drive that you want to keep onto a separate disk.
5. Use macrium reflects bootable USB tool to format your OS drive and write your original cloned image to that drive.
6. When you boot in, your OS will be exactly as it was when you first cloned it. Likely, things have changed since then though, so any software folders on that secondary drive will be a good reminder of stuff you might want to reinstall as a new "critical must have app" and then clone the OS drive again for next time. Make a list of these programs you need to reinstall and format that secondary drive before reinstalling (yeah you gotta do this manually). Steam you can just run as admin from the folder and launch any games which will quickly reinstall from the data already there. Annoyingly, origin and epic etc don't play as nicely.
Don't do this. It's complete nonsense. The releases of Win10 are far too regular (and I'm not just talking about H1/H2 releases). Even v1909 has monthly releases upto April 2020 so if you stuck in an imaged October 1909 clone, you'd spend the next hour, minimum, waiting for updates.
If you need to re-install, the most you need to grab from your OS drive is the DriverStore, copy it to USB. Grab the latest version of Win10 you want to use. Win10 takes 10 minutes to install. Using a good package manager scripted with your must have apps and you're back up and running, even with an Office install, within an hour tops.
Yeah but then you need to reinstall all your gubbins, mess about with settings you like to change etc. It balances about even. You got your updates yeah, but typically I tweak my install each time and then clone again. I don't use the same ancient clone
Fair enough, I just don't see the point. After Win10 installs, it takes my laptop about 12 minutes to:
Install all drivers after boot
Create two User accounts
Apply local policies for security baselines
Install:
- Chrome
- Visual Code
- Spotify
- Windows Terminal
- Azure CLI
- Terraform
- VLC
- MPC-BE
- Paint Net
- Azure Storage Explorer
And another 5 mins to install Office CTR.
And all of it is one PS script. So bar the initial install, I do nothing. I can't stand the thought of re-imaging, updating Windows, updating all the software versions then cloning again. What a yawn fest.
Tbf scripting installs would be an awesome solution if I knew how to do it
Soldato
As he has said a powershell script is ample to do that.
I'll need to look into that for sure. Not something I've tried before
Soldato
There are a few guys that try to automate the bloat out of the box. They provide the script from their github. Take a look as you wont find it difficult once you take a look.
Associate
id say i install windows maybe once a year, and usually when i do upgrades (mainly hard drives), and usually because id botched the clone and erased the first one (Story of my life)
Do you have one in particular that you're thinking of?
By the way, these pseduo-avatars of gangster characters makes it really hard to identify who says what quickly. grumblegrumblegrumble
Soldato
Doesn't remove, hides.