ADDITIONAL MEASURES TO INSURE A SAFE AND SWIFT REINSTALLATION

One reason I’m spending so much time on this topic is that it’s the most important action you’re likely to take on your computer. Some of what I have to say I only learned after I reformatted my own disk.

Once you have everything in place, it’s easy to do it again. Every time your computer accumulates intruders you can’t get rid of without editing the registry according to instructions from Symantec or your anti-virus company’s support site, you can reformat and reinstall in hours. If you’ve installed too many programs which slows your computer down, perhaps uninstalling them leaves debris in your registry.

Now that I’ve got the procedure down pat, I plan to reinstall every several months.

In my first column on reinstalling your operating system -“When It’s Time To Reformat Your Hard Disk” of July 15, 2004 – I discussed the importance of drivers:

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 , 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.

It turns out that DriverGuide Toolkit is very good, but less than perfect. Let’s go through the paces. Open the Toolkit either from Start -> All Programs, or from the Shortcut on your desktop.

Click on Backup Drivers

Several steps should be taken in order. First click ‘My Installed Drivers’. Then list non-Microsoft drivers. (As I mentioned in the column above, Windows automatically installs Microsoft drivers. And updates are available from Microsoft sites, particularly Windows Updates. I described how to connect to there.)

My Saved Drivers tab will only list the drivers you’ve already saved.

If you’re using the Toolkit for the first time, it’ll search your computer for all the drivers. If you’ve run the Toolkit before, it’ll list all the drivers. (Some of which you may not have saved).

Click the ‘Select All’ option button.

Notice on the left the second button from the bottom allows you to select the folder in which to store the backups. Next to it is the Toolkit’s default selection, In my case it’s H:\MyDrivers. In most cases it’ll be C:\MyDrivers.

For right now, let the default stand and click the button ‘Backup Selected Drivers’.

Now, for the first surprise, navigate to the default folder. If you forgot how, click the start button and a little more than half way up the right hand column click on ‘My Computer’.

In my case I click on H and then navigate to MyDrivers. In most cases you’d click on C and navigate to MyDrivers.

What do we see when we get there? MyDrivers. Well, not quite. You have to hunt within the folder.

All sorts of stuff in the folder. Note a folder named xxx. I’ll explain that in just a minute. For brevity’s sake the actual drivers are within the DENNIST folder. I had to hunt for it. You may too. Not pretty, but the drivers are there.

You’ll want to note that before you reinstall windows. If you don’t know it beforehand, you’ll be very frustrated.

There’s another problem with the Toolkit. It didn’t find two drivers. One is the driver for my Olympus digital camera, and the other is the driver that connects by broadband with my telephone company.

It so happens I had the Olympus CD ROM within easy reach – I’m fairly well organized – as well as my WOW driver CD, as the service is called in Israel. In your jurisdiction the arrangement between your telephone company, your ISP and your network card may vary.

In both these cases, the problem would have been easy to solve. I would have called my ISP, who would have referred me to the phone company. The phone company would have given me the link from where I could download the driver. Still, precious hours would have ticked by. In the case of my digital camera, I would have searched google for Olympus digital cameras and quickly found the site from where I could download the driver.

So while DriverGuide Toolkit eases your path, it doesn’t eliminate some thinking and work on your part altogether.

Unfortunately, there are further problems with application serial numbers and activation codes that Belarc adviser doesn’t solve. Furthermore, unless you’ve kept track, you may lose your passwords for certain sites. Fortunately, there are applications that recover passwords. I’ll get to these two problems next week.

Dennis Turner