Reload!

It was inevitable. I had to reload XP on my computer at work. It had to be done because I kept having little errors pop up that would crash the explorer.exe process. The “This won’t take too long” idea turned into “Do I really need all this crap?” after I realized how much software I use almost daily.

I used nLite and RyanVM Integrator to create an XP Pro install CD that had all of my drivers and most of the MS hotfixes. The drivers were the most important. The hard drives in my workstation, a Dell Precision 490, are set up on an Intel SATA RAID. The original Windows XP Pro CD doesn’t have the drivers. Integrating the drivers made it so that I didn’t have to hit F6 during the installation start. Plus, I had the latest drivers for all of the hardware installed on first boot.

It took a while to reinstall all of the applications. Once it was done, I made a Ghost backup. Everything is running much better and faster. I’m going to start utilizing the Windows XP virtual machine (VMware Server) more for testing software. I think the installing and uninstalling of software was one factor in causing the errors.

The first program I’m going to test is DriveImage XML. It’s free, backs up to an XML file and creates hot backups because it uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy service. It looks like a pretty nice application. If it runs well on the VM, I’ll install it on my workstation so that I always have a current backup.

If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought. – Dennis Roth

29.Nov.07 Windows

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2 Responses to “Reload!”

  1. Rollie | November 30th, 2007 at 9:25 am

    I’m crazy about Shadow Copy! That’s one of the main reasons I’m running Server 2003 on a laptop like a dumbass. ;)

  2. Cody | November 30th, 2007 at 11:15 am

    I haven’t used Shadow Copy in a long time, I should look into it again. The thing I remember I didn’t like about it was that you didn’t have that much control over it, unless something has changed since I last used it.

    The only backup solution I’ve found that I love is rsync. A simple cron job with rsync works like magic, and the incremental backup means that it only backs up data that’s been changed since the last run.

    I’m using Vista right now (shoot me), it’s only for gaming and high-end applications. So yeah, I’m kind of back on the Microsoft bandwagon.

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