Back On The Air Again!

I have now reformatted my Vista Hard Drive and reinstalled many of my programs. Now the computer seems to start up beautifully, Microsoft Office runs like a dream and everything seems to be going OK. I say "seems" because the reformat and reinstall has not all gone smoothly.

Some of the advice I got, "Put the Vista disk in and off you go!" was a little on the simplistic side.

I have reinstalled Vista (or XP) a total of 5 times over the last few days! What do they say "Fifth time lucky!" However my latest reformat and reinstall has gone quite well following on what I have learnt over the previous 4 installs!

I have learnt about "format" and "partitions". I have learnt you install Vista onto a new partition you want to create. By doing this you overwrite everything on your hard drive, thus giving you a 'clean install'. I now know what each of the disks I received with my PC when I bought it are for too!

The first 2 reinstalls I tried had the 'old Vista' files left on the PC, not what I wanted for a clean install. I installed a copy of XP which allowed me to fully reformat the hard drive (and thus wipe everything off). Then I installed Vista over the top of that. However I made a calculated guess as to whether or not I should install some 'drivers' which led me to a "blue screen of death' about 10 hours later! I should have installed the drivers shouldn't I!

The final reinstall was done slowly, one thing at a time and allowed for Windows to fully update before moving on to the next step. There were still a few hiccups but all seems to great right now!

With 5 installs you can imagine how my stress level was!

I am sure it will be worth while with trouble free computing for the next year or so!