Rebuild of computer

[Fat Bob]

OK, I'm thinking of re-building my computer, well, re-installing the original software to Dell specs. It's getting slower and slower, Internet Explorer fails to work whilst other apps are running slow-to-breakdown sort of speed. I've done varoius sweeps and deleted temporary files and the like, but sitll not getting that much quicker. Any advice on what I have to do?

Back up files onto portable hard drive, double-back up the important ones onto DVD drive.

Is it worth getting a new hard drive? Or should I try the current one? Anything to tell me how good or bad the hard drive is at the mo?

It's a 2.5 year old Dell and, to be honest, replacing it is not an option for at least 6 months if I don't have to.

Anything else I should do?

I'll stick with XP as I don't want to spend $$ on upgrading the memory etc for Vista.

[Fat Bob]

Maybe I spoke too early: just deleted Java 6 update 10 and everything seems to be better! Hmmmm......maybe I use the net too much!

Oh, well, advice will still be looked at for when I do it in two months time!

[Sardonicus]

I don't keep anything local anymore, only copies, the rest I store off-board. I don't trust discs past a year or so, have replaced more than I care to remember.

If you rebuild start fresh.

[Jedi]

Well according to this, update 10 is still in beta, so how did it end up on your system?

[Fat Bob]

Must have mistakenly installed it when I put Firefox on.

Didn't understand why I had 4 versions of the fecker on bord. Surely the newer ones uninstall the older ones? But no! Versions 3,6,7 and 10 were all happy causing conflicts etc.

[baloo]

Java is the devil's spawn.

[Burbage]

One thing that would be a good idea is to get the operating system onto a disk that no other program uses. I always think this when I'm rebuilding the OS, but almost all programs seem to default to the OS host drive. Anyone got a good way to do this other than manually installing everything and manually changing every program's settings to use a different drive for saves etc, because then the rebuild wouldn't mean that you have to restore every program, just the OS.

Does Vista give any better options for this?

[Fat Bob]

I've done that for some of the work computers, especially those with large amounts of data. However, difficult to do in a single HD laptop. It would be even better to have 3 hard drives, one for OS, one for programs and one for data, especially if you were using high-MB/GB data (movies, photos) or data that you were forever accessing/re-writing/deleting. The hard drive that's most likely to go down first would be the data drive hence you wouldn't want the rest to have to be re-installed as well.

Not sure what Vista does for this, but hey, as only 1-5% of the world's computer population would even bother using it, where's the financial reward for an OS manufacturer to put in such an improvement?

edit - it can be done in XP: change the environment variable in System Properties (Control Panel > System > Advanced> Environment Variables button > System Variables). Then any program that uses the variable will access the new path.

[Jedi]

I've done that for some of the work computers, especially those with large amounts of data. However, difficult to do in a single HD laptop. It would be even better to have 3 hard drives, one for OS, one for programs and one for data, especially if you were using high-MB/GB data (movies, photos) or data that you were forever accessing/re-writing/deleting. The hard drive that's most likely to go down first would be the data drive hence you wouldn't want the rest to have to be re-installed as well.

Actually even easier is buying 4 drives and running Raid 10 (striping and mirroring) - that's what I have on my latest PC. If one drive fails, just replace it and the raid controller automatically rebuilds the array. You don't lose anything. Obviously this is only for desktops.