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Vista is Dead - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2010

Systematically clean your computer desk-top and archive any stray files. Your desk-top should not ordinarily have any important files on it, as they will be lost by an operating system corruption but heyho who's perfect, it is with some shame that we can report having had 10GB on the desk-top!

Important data files should not be stored just on your C-Drive as this is the one that is going to be reformatted before the new installation. These files should be stored, as copies, on another drive and preferably backed up to a third drive and/or DVD. Only when you are secure in the knowledge that your precious files are available in at least two other places should you proceed. Backing up and checking the files for Professional Imagemaker involved a little under 75,000 image files alone and took a couple of days. This included synchronising the folders and then checking the files were intact. Less than a dozen files failed to synchronise automatically and were dealt with manually, after checking them in their host program.

For system files such as fonts and colour profiles it is best to archive the entire folder and then transfer back the entire contents after the reinstallation. You may end up putting a small amount of dross back into the new folder but that is probably preferable than opening an album or document months or years later and finding an essential font is missing.

Remember that some of the files are in quite obscure places. A typical example is the template files for Excel spreadsheets. You may have spent quite some time making one of these for your price list and then saved it as a .XLT file. Finding it for archiving is a nightmare as it lives (for example) at the address below:

C:\users\users name\App Data\Roaming\Microsoft\templates

We defy anybody to remember that string!

Having secured all the relevant data you are ready to install the new operating system

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/10/2010
last update 09/12/2022 15:00:07

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