Wipe Your Disks If Upgrading
You may or may not know or care that the new Windows Vista is coming out in January. I have been reading some about it, but that is for another day. I am posting because it stuns me that the tech publications that I read don’t emphasize reformatting your hard drive entirely before upgrading to a newer operating system. This is a must. Do not try to run the disc and then choose to upgrade what you have. Too much junk and unnecessary data get embedded in the works after a while, especially if you have installed and uninstalled a lot of different programs over time. You probably have programs that you don’t ever use anymore that you shouldn’t bother keeping. Not to mention, some older programs and drivers won’t work on newer OS versions.
Personally, I think it is helpful to back up all of your personal stuff and reformat and reinstall Windows every year. I think this is a good idea. At least every 18 months or so. You’d be amazed at how often device drivers are updated as well as all of your software. Every so often, I’ll save my documents to my second hard drive, then reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch. This gives you a reason to download the latest versions of all your software and drivers. I find that the computer, at least for a while, runs faster than it used to.
This whole post feels a bit random, but I’ll add another tip. Another good idea is that if you have two hard drives in your PC, have Windows save the memory swap file on the other disk, away from the OS installation. This supposedly speeds things up when it has to read and write from it and load other data. Just my $.02.
