Quote:
| Originally Posted by mark w Hi all.
Question for all you technical people.
My sony viao laptop is about 3 years old or so, it seems to have got increasingly slow, suspect it is messed up with all sort of rubbish, have run various sweepers etc. including hitman pro. |
It being a Sony Viao of that age I would be inclined to run some disk diagnostics before going to the trouble of a rebuild.
Quote:
|
But I think it is maybe time to start from scratch again, I created the rescue discs from when it was new and feel that now might be a good time to totally erase everything on the hard drive and start fresh. Obviously I would need to save all my important documents 1st, which I could save onto cd.
|
Find the Profile and Settings transfer wizard and follow the promprs. Saving to a USB memory stick would be an alternative to a CD. Nothing wrong with a CD I am just a little impatient.
Be aware you will lose any applications that you have installed since buying the Laptop. Make sure you have the original installation sources for the ones you might want to use again.
Quote:
From doing this years ago with win95 I seem to remember somthing about a format command to fully wipe the hard drive before reloading from the rescue discs.
Can someone just briefly outline the process for me
|
Formatting re-writes the basic magnetic arrangement of blocks and sectors on the disk erasing (well sort of) whatever was on the disk before. Formatting a Win32 (XP) system partition (disk) can be a bit of an arse and I personally would not bother when using a rescue disk. The rescue disk will effectively rewrite the basic arrangement of the disk up to the amount of space it needs to occupy - some do the whole disk it just depends on how the rescue image was prepared.
If you really want to clear a disk something like DBAN is a better option but it might interfere with the rescue disk operation.
Have fun
