WHEN IT’S TIME TO REFORMAT YOUR HARD DISK

Sooner or later we all need to. Perhaps your hard disk fails. All hard disks fail sooner or later. Or you’ve installed too many programs and uninstalled too many trial programs. Your computer has slowed to a crawl because your registry is fractured, full of errors.

Maybe your system’s been hit by numerous virii or other intruders that are impossible to get rid of. Perhaps you want to partition your hard disk or add or change operating systems.

Are you prepared? How long will it take you to get back up?

I’m directing this to myself as well. My system has gotten sluggish, and with all the precautions I’ve taken, there’s some pesky intruders I just can’t seem to get rid of.

The first step should be to backup all your important documents and files. If you’ve installed some applications from downloads, you’d better backup those as well, as well as the instructions for installing them. Make sure to backup your email, address and appointment books, and databases.

How should you back them up? One way is copying them to CD’s. Another is opening a Yahoo email account. Yahoo is giving away 100 megabytes for free, and 2 gigabytes for &19.99 a year. Attach these files to an email from your regular address to your Yahoo account. I’m in the process of doing both.

When you reformat you don’t just reformat your files. You reformat the whole computer. Quick! Can you reproduce your Windows license serial number? What company manufactured your video card and what model is it? What about your modem or network card? Do you have their drivers stored on a floppy disk or CD somewhere? What about all your other programs? Microsoft Office? Ten or twenty other programs. Can you find their installation CDs and serial numbers?

Can you get your computer back to a working state within two or three hours? Can you?

If you’re not prepared in advance, it can take you days, even weeks before you’re fully functioning again. You may lose some important data permanently.

If you don’t have your video driver, you are going to have to rely on Windows’ default VGA driver, that holdover from the earliest days.

But without the million colors, you can’t use Photoshop! And if you don’t know your Photoshop license, you won’t be able to work with the program anyway.

Forget Photoshop. If you don’t know your Windows license, you aren’t going anywhere.

I know that some of you think it can’t happen to you. Maybe Spy Sweeper and Norton and a registry cleaner will keep a killer intruder from ever putting down one of our systems. However I already have a few pesky intruders that I can’t get rid of and I bet many of you do to.

Even if you don’t, it’s only a matter of time until your hard disk stops working. Every computer component dies to some point.

You probably don’t have all your backups drivers and licenses in order. I bet you don’t. Some of those components were installed ages ago, and their driver disks have gone the way of all silicon.

Even if hire a computer guy to do this under-the-hood kind of work, they will appreciate having this information ready – and will probably charge you less for the work. Otherwise the only way for them to figure out which drivers are which is to open the computer and check the little numbers on the cards. Geeky and effective, but time-consuming and dirty work.

If you want to see what the inside of your computer looks like, look no further than Belarc Home Advisor, which will instantly analyse your PC and deliver a full report crammed with information and statistics that will help you reconstruct things when and if the time for reformatting comes.

When you run the program, Belarc produces its report on a local Web page, which lets you easily navigate between its sections. Among other things, the program will tell you about your operating system and your patch history. Each patch (also known as a hot fix) has a link describing what it does.

These are the same patches that you download with your Windows Update, the ones Microsoft deem extremely important for protecting your system.

The program also lists installed memory, disk information, software versions and, where relevant, software licenses and product keys, including your Microsoft operating system license. The program saves all this information in its web file, which you should coy onto another medium as soon as possible.

Belarc does not upload any information to its own servers. Belarc is free for home use and can be downloaded from www.belarc.com/free-download.html (for all PCs).

Patches and licenses are only half the story. Even more difficult for most people to track down are their system drivers. A driver is a little piece of software that tells your system how to use the peripheral, or device you want to use. Your network card may emerge for a reformat intact, for which card do you have? Your system needs to know what to do with the card – that it communicates on a network, can handle a specific download speed, and so on.

The problem with drivers is that there are so many of them; there are hundreds of different network cards, and each communicates with the system a bit differently.

When you buy a card or peripheral, it usually comes with a floppy disk or CD program that you run when you set up the device. Then you put the disk or CD away – and unless you are very organized, you never find it again. And there is the danger of a driver CD becoming inoperable due to scratches, etc.

You can avoid the hassle of long searches through Web sites and unending attempts to revive driver disks by running DriverGuide Toolkit. ( www.driverguidetoolkit.com/ ) which will back up all your drivers into a folder of your choosing. Copy this folder unto a CD and mail it to your Yahoo email account and start reformatting.

When you reinstall the system and start setting up your cards and peripherals, you will have all the driver installation (.inf ) you need. The program can back up all drivers, but it recommends you back up only non-Windows drivers, since Windows drivers are installed by the Windows install process or patches you subsequently download.

The program can also download driver updates directly for manufacturers, or from the Driverguid Web site ( http://www.driverguide.com ) – a free to join Web site that has an archive of almost every driver in existence – over 100,000, with links to manufacturers, member discussions and suggestions about substitutes, whether a Windows 2000 driver will work with XP, and so on.

Belarc Advisor is free for use on your home PC. DriveGuide Toolkit is shareware, but you can use it free for two days ($19.95 afterwards).

Dennis Turner