Reformat or not to reformat

Ok, so I recently ordered my Studio XPS 16 and hopefully it will be coming 5/15/09(crossing fingers). I am debating if I should reformat when I get it, I am a little nervous about doing it. I was just thinking about manually uninstalling some of the crap that comes with it, like the facial recognition since I know I wont use it. Will I see a noticeable performance increase if I reformat? Or should I just uninstall the things I wont use?

 

You should wipe the drive and re-install the OS. These days it seems like factory images are more and more often just junk. Depending on the amount of trial-ware and overall bloat on the factory image, you may or may not see huge jumps in performance, but a clean install will by and large take care of all the software issues who might have otherwise encountered.

Uninstalling stuff has always just seemed like a kludge solution to me.

 

This may have been stated in other forums, but what is the approximate time for reformatting and installing drivers? My patience will be limited when my new shiny laptop comes and I want to use it, hehe

 

Well, I mean, you don't need to do the re-install immediately. I'd actually play around with the stock install, just to make sure you don't have any glaring hardware issues. When the time comes that you'd usually try to clean out the system, that's when you should do the re-install.

If you know what you're doing, I'd say a clean install can take under an hour; I've done clean installs in the realm of 45 minutes with XP (and I think Vista and 7 installations might be faster), from nothing to having all the appropriate drivers loaded.

 

Vista clean installs are not faster than XP, by the time you install, Depending if you have to install SP1 or if its integrated and then drivers its a couple of hours. X64 seems to take longer from my experience as well.

I always wipe off the factory image tho...everything always seems to run faster, smoother and no software crashes.

 

I just reinstalled Vista Home Premium 64 bit with SP1 on the disk on my Studio 1535 in about half an hour, and then add another 20 minutes for drivers and necessary programs (antivirus, etc.)

 

How to you restore an image which came on the 2nd partition?

 

Reboot, press F8. Restoring from the partition is one of the options there. I never used it, though; I prefer a clean install, and the factory images is full of crap.

 

I just deleted the recovery partition, and did a clean install... THE PARTITION DELETION TOOK A WHILE, But the (64bit Vista) re-install took about an hour, with drivers installed, then with updates, and extra software, about another hour.

 

Is there a step by step guide for 64 bit Vista install for XPS that I can use as reference.

If you do a clean install I assume everything is wiped in including the MD?
Do you have an option to create a recovery partition in the clean install.

Thanks in advance

 

the recovery partition is Dell's work... you can't create a recovery partition in the clean install

but then, what i suggest is to partition your internal HDD into at least 2: OS = 50GB, working = rest..

install all your applications and tweaks to your OS, then clone the OS partition and save onto your working partition(or external).. next time windows goes slow/virus, everything's just a simple image restoration away, and you have your documents in the working partition without needing to worry about an external HDD... i use Acronis True Image... really useful


i'd suggest ubuntu, but don't think many users want to try a marginally different operating system (even though it boots and loads Opera/Firefox in 50 seconds from boot, even after installing the stuff I need(WINE, VMware, drivers, ftp tools, VLC, other stuff is built in[OpenOffice, PDF Viewer, File manager, DVD/CD Burner]

 

I'm getting my SXPS 16 in the mail by the end of the week. I'm going to get rid of a lot of the bloatware but a reformat is out of my league and besides there are some programs I wish to keep. What's the best way to trim down on the bloatware? A simple uninstall through the Windows tool or use one of those "complete uninstall" third party programs?

 

I went through and just deleted programs that I will not be using I figured I will do a clean install when windows 7 is released later this year for sale not RC

 

I skimmed over all of the posts, and at the slight risk of repeating information...

Fresh Install EVERYTHING yourself.
Once the system is where you want it, install Norton Ghost, Image the whole system, put the image on some unused, reliable USB HDD. Make a recovery CD (via Ghost or from Symantec's website) and use that to restore your system.

Commit a lazy Sunday morning to the project because devoting 4 hours to the project now will save you many times that amount of time later.

Make sure all drivers, programs, Service Packs, updates, etc. are where you want them before you proceed.

When you want to add something to the "Master Image," backup your current system, re-load the Master Image, add to it, re-image the system back to the new Master Image and then re-load your most recently saved system Image.

 

I am thinking of the same thing, to reformat or not. My laptop is arriving soon. I'm wondering if there is a program cd included that has the dock and some other "useful bloatware." And after reformating, do I have one big partition or do I have the option to choose how big and how many partitions? I don't think I have done reformating so I want to make sure I don't mess up my new toy. Thank you.

 

Format the hard drive and reinstall.. It is not worth it to keep the stock windows they throw on it
Just go to the dell.com/support and download the latest drivers and after the windows install is done, load the latest drivers for every thing