Give Windows a Clean Start - How To Reinstall Your OS the Right Way

Posted 02/12/2009 at 11:00am | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Clean start. OS reset. Nuke and pave. Whatever you call it, no matter how good a personal system administrator you are, there’s a time to take your OS install out behind the shed and put two in its head.

When would you need to take such extreme measures? If the networking stack is splayed out on the floor and no amount of patching, registry editing, or Winsock repair tools can fix it. If you can’t get hibernate or standby to work anymore. Or if you’ve had a horrible malware or rootkit breakout. Sure, you may have reclaimed control of your PC after an epic five-day battle with the beast, but can you really trust your OS anymore? You don’t want to reenact the final sequence from The Thing, you and your PC eyeing one another wondering if the other is not what he seems to be.

A clean start is the only way to relieve your paranoia. It can also save you countless hours of troubleshooting and tweaking a misbehaving machine. Follow along as we instruct you on the proper way to do a clean install—whether you’re using XP or Vista—that will have your OS acting like the young pup it once was. Plus, we’ll show you how to create a pristine image of your OS that’ll save your bacon the next time your rig melts down.   

Out With The Old, In With The New

Before embarking on our clean start regimen, read through the instructions to make sure you have all the tools you’ll need and a thorough understanding of the process.

You can do a clean start using just your old drive and a pile of DVDs for backup, but we recommend that you use our method and buy two new hard drives. You’ll use one as your new C: drive and the second to store your backups and images. (Consider the original drive as a backup of all your data up to this point.) Here’s our reasoning: First, an OS reinstall is the perfect time to make the jump to a new drive. Second, the performance benefits of your clean install will only be enhanced by using a newer, larger drive. The new 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda, for example, has an average read speed of 104MB/s. Your old 500GB drive probably tops out in the 50MB/s to 60MB/s range, depending on the generation of the drive.

You’ll also see significant performance benefits if you have a lot of data because a drive’s performance weakens as it approaches full capacity—so that 400GB of data on a 1.5TB drive or even a 1TB drive won’t impinge performance as it would on a 500GB drive. Finally, storage has become one of the most inexpensive components in a PC. So take our advice and spend the $200 on two new 1TB drives and save yourself some heartache.

If you choose to ignore our advice and reinstall the OS on your original drive, you must back up all your data to discs before proceeding. 

Take Stock of Your Apps

Before you make a clean start, you need to consider the applications you’ll be bringing with you. First, make sure you have all of your application discs. One of the most important tasks is to take stock of any registration codes that you need for your software. Locate and record the registration keys that you will need. If you can’t find the keys, try Magic Jelly Bean 2.0, a free utility available at Download.com or Sourceforge.net. The application will search through the registry for application keys. It won’t find all the keys you need, but it might help you locate that one key you can’t find.

Magic Jelly Bean 2.0 is sometimes identified as a hacking tool by antivirus apps, but if you download it from a reputable site such as Download.com, you should be fine. If you can’t locate a particular key, contact the vendor for a replacement key or a copy of your original key before you proceed if you know you’re going to need access to the app. You did write down your Windows XP or Windows Vista key, right?

Deactivate Your Apps

Many applications require activation before running—even if you have a legitimate serial number. You can’t, for example, reinstall Photoshop without reactivating it, so deactivate any programs on your old drive that use this copy-protection technique.

Software activation is the harsh consequence of software piracy. Fortunately, it’s merely an inconvenience, not a major undertaking. To minimize your reinstall efforts, you should take stock of the applications that require activation before you do your clean start. Most professional Adobe applications require that you deactivate the program before it can be installed elsewhere. To do this, click Help and then Deactivate. This should deactivate the suite, but to be safe, fire up your other Adobe apps and check to see if they have been deactivated.

You’ll need Internet access for the application to talk to Adobe’s servers. Adobe’s activation is more finicky than the one Microsoft uses, and disk changes, such as imaging from one drive to another, can trigger activation. For other programs, you may want to research how the individual software vendor treats reactivation. Microsoft Office 2007 can simply be reinstalled on your new hard drive and reactivated. You’ll likely have to reactivate by phone though, as the program may fail an Internet reactivation. Just explain that you are installing to a new hard drive and you should be fine.

Not all vendors are as accessible, however, so if there is a critical application that you need access to, you may want to contact the vendor first to find out what the activation policy is. Obviously, if you don’t know if the program will reactivate and you need to access it, wait until you have the answer before you do your clean start and consider doing your reinstall during normal business hours when the vendor can be contacted.

Prep iTunes and Steam

Moving your iTunes library is fairly easy, but it can be made more complicated by differences among versions. If you’re running iTunes 7 and plan to use iTunes 8 on your clean install, we suggest that you install iTunes 8 on your existing hard drive first. It doesn’t always happen, but people have reported issues migrating the database from iTunes 7 to iTunes 8. You should also consolidate your library by going to File > Library > Consolidate Library in iTunes. This will copy the various music and video files that are scattered around your PC into the iTunes directory at C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\My

Documents\My Music\iTunes (or C:\Users\your user name\Music\iTunes on Vista). Once you’re done, migrating your library is as easy as copying the iTunes folder of your old drive into the \My Documents\My Music\ folder of your new drive. Your final move in iTunes will be to turn out the lights. In iTunes, go to Advanced > Deauthorize and deauthorize the computer. This will prevent you from playing any protected content that you downloaded from iTunes on your PC until you have reauthorized the computer on your new OS install.

Backing up your Steam games with the app’s built-in utility will save you a lot of downloading later on. Alternatively, you can copy the entire Steam directory over from your old drive to your new one.

Likewise, if you have any games using Valve’s Steam service, we recommend that you use the program’s built-in backup feature to create a backup of your games folder. Generally, just copying the entire Steam directory over to the new install will work, but having the backup file will help should you encounter problems. While the old drive is up and running, you should hunt down any saved games you want. We can’t tell you where to find the saved games for each particular title, as developers use different locations. Check the individual C:\Program Files\game name folders to see if the saved games are there, if they aren’t in a subfolder of Documents.