Ghost image vs. Format + Re-install...


  

25 members have voted

  1. 1. Ghost image vs. Format + Re-install...

    • Man, I'll Ghost Image the damn thing
      9
    • Meh... I'll reload everything
      16


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I made an image of my HDD right after i installed windows and got everything working just right...

It takes less than 7min to do the ghost, which does all of the following..

- Formats

- Installs Windows Again

I really like it, because i just have to tell it where the image is, and it does the rest... I do not have to stand around and type in ****. So thats what i would suggest

making IMages is a LOT better than formatting specially when you have settings galore and color settings registry tweaks/hacks all that **** that you'd forget to do again if you did format that along with all the programs you may have installed etc. but i guess a good format is good every once in a while

Ghosting is much better if you had to do what I did last year. Our company is contracted to the bigest steel producer in Africa and they requested a complete change from 386/486 and Pentium1/2 up to P3's running Windows 2000. Now all the PC's were already loaded with Windows 2000 when we received them but they needed to have updates and security settings done as well as Office 2000, Antivirus package and various programs installed. So doing something like 3000 installs was going to be much easier with a ghost.

So for about 2 months I was doing installs on a few hundred PC's. The image sure did help as it only took about 10 minutes per PC. Now to load the whole lot would have been around 2 hours per PC. Work out the difference and multiply that by 3000 and you get the idea on what a time saver it is.

But for a single user I guess formatting and installing once in a blue moon is not gonna be much of a problem. I wanted to image after my last format but never got round to it. Best is do as many updates as possible to the OS. Install must have software then tweak and then finally make an image. That way it is at it's best setup so that you can bugger it all up without a worry.

"Ghosting" is basically creating a copy or "image" of your harddrive which you can use to restore your system with later in case of failure as an example. The benefit of this is its fast, around 10 mins on average as opposed to an hour or two to reinstall manually and then your apps and favorite tweaks.

This image can be burned to cd and can be used as many times and on as many systems as you like. It is an exact copy, so it will restore everything, your apps, settings, and your OS.

Visit www.norton.com and see if they have a trial version of Norton Ghost on offer for download.

Greetz

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