Garnet's Advice For Essential Steps For Setting Up A New Machine Or Laptop

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How To Setup A New Machine Or New Laptop

Subjects > Computers

Tech Tips By Garnet

One of the hidden costs of buying a new laptop or new desktop computer is all the time it takes to get the machine setup with all the software that you own and need on a regular basis. Most computers will come with a set of disaster recovery CDs. Some manufacturers started providing the disaster recovery software in a hidden partition on your computer, saving them the cost of bundling a few CDs or a DVD or two. They usually offer

If you've been into computers for a while, it can take a while to get your system customized for your use. When I do this I need to install an office suite, such as Microsoft Office, maybe an OCR program or two, some developing enviroments such as DevStudio?Create and Perl, some books and research software that Ilike to carry around, a couple of my favorite games, some accounting software (QuickBooks ), and the software and drivers to sync up with my PDA, phone, camera, and printer. Along with doing all the required security updates to the operating system, virus scanners, and other software, I've found it can take a whole day to get your machine setup.

Last year I decided I wanted to have some insurance in case of system crashes in the future, I wanted to preserve that whole days work. I decided to create my own set of disaster recovery CDs.

This year I decided to go through this process again, and discovered it can easily waste almost an entire week! I wrote about it here: Garnet's Annual 2005 System Restore And Disaster Recovery CD Creation Tips

Here is a summary of the essential steps for setting up a new machine or laptop. I've got over 20 years experience dealing with PCs, and yet even I can run into problems that take a lot of time to install, I've spent several days this time around trying to get my machine setup the way I want it. Imagine if this had been your computer, and you were paying someone to get your setup, or worse yet, wasting your own time. This information took me all week to discover, so consider the following tips to be worth about $2000 of a geeks time:

1. If your machine did not come with disaster recovery CDs:
   1. Make sure you immediately use whatever wizard is provided to make a set of CDs
   2. Call the manufacturer and raise a bloody stink with them for not providing media with your machine. Most manufacturers can be embarrassed into sending you a set of recovery cds.
2. Find the original disks and product keys for all the software you regularly use.
3. Buy a program that makes good disaster recovery backups. The only one I've found that is acceptible is NovaStor?Create's NovaBackup?Create.
   1. Characteristics of a good backup solution:
      1. It can create disaster recovery boot CD
      2. It can use external mass storage devices so you don't have to waste a lot of CDs making interrim disaster recovery backups.
   2. It's also good to have an external hard drive to use for making the disaster backups, it's quicker than feeding disks to te program
4. Install all the programs one by one
   1. If you are only using original manufacturer CDs for all your programs, it's probably safe to turn off virus checking so that the installs go quicker
   2. Note: At one point after a set of operating system patches, the virus checker started having problems. I had to go back to a previous disaster recovery backup.
   3. Note: I actually seemed to find it necessary to uninstall the virus checker until after I'd run all of Microsoft's security udpates, and then after I was finished with them, I reinstalled the virus checker. It's risky to run without a virus checker, so be sure you are only installing trusted software and being very careful about what websites you go to on the net while the virus scanner is not installed.
5. Wait until after everything is installed to do updates
6. Since some installs if not completed properly can cause problems later, careful watch your machine between the installs and make sure your machine is still working ok at each step. Some of the steps to make sure your machine is still ok:
   1. When you reboot, watch that the machine starts up with acceptible speed
   2. Make sure each of the installs is happening properly.
   3. Notice if any icons in the system tray start showing black boxes.
   4. If you've left the virus scanner installed, like Norton AntiVirus?Create, periodically click on it to make sure it comes up ok and shows a proper status.
   5. Carefully watch that installs complete without stalling for a long time with no disk activity. During an install, your disk drive light should be flashing a lot.
      1. One of the gotchas I discovered this week is that apparently some of the microsoft updates can hose your register so that software installations start having problems. I noticed during one of my iterations of trying to setup my computer that program installations were stalling with the progress bar being at about 80% completion. I ended up going back to a previous disaster recovery, and redoing a lot of patches to get around the problem.
      2. I found that using the TimerShot?Create utility that comes as a Windows XP Power Toy was a great program to use to test my machine. It's a small program, and you can install and uninstall it as you go along to make sure that your system hasn't degraded.
7. During the process of installing your programs, and your machine is still operating properly, you might periodically make a disaster recovery backup so you have a good point to return to in case later installs or patches cause problems.
8. Once you've installed all your software, make a set of disaster recovery backups.
9. Apply all the microsoft operating system updates. Do not select major service pack updates until you have applied all previous updates. For example, after you've upgraded to Service Pack 1, don't skip ahead to apply Service Pack 2 until you've first made all the system upgrades that came before Service Pack 2. Microsoft will offer to let you apply Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 1 without going through that process, but my experience this week is that may cause problems.
10. If you uninstalled your virus checked, reinstall your virus checker.
11. Use the update function in the virus scanner to get it up to date with the latest virus definitions and updates. With Norton Internet Security, I had to rerun the update function probably 6 times, since each time it got a few more updates, but then needed to reboot or asked me to run the LiveUpdate?Create again so that it could get additional updates
12. When you're all done, make your final disaster recovery backup. You should take the time to copy this disaster recovery backup to CD, or even DVDs if you have a DVD writer.

If you follow this process, you'll end with a very valuable set of disks that you can use in the future to restore your machine to good working order very quickly. Remember, this process is like insurance: You pay the price to do it right, and although you hope you'll never need to use the insurance, you'll be very glad you have it if in the future you should need it.

Other related articles:

• Garnet's Annual 2005 System Restore And Disaster Recovery CD Creation Tips
• [Microsoft Outlook 2003 Lacks Command To Run All Rules]?Create
• Garnet's Annual 2006 Bootable Disaster Recovery Disk Tips

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Tech Tips By Garnet ...

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I spend a lot of time tracking down solutions to many problems and questions, and it takes a lot of time to write about the answers so you can benefit from them. But I hope this page helped you solve your problem, or answered your question, clearly and quickly. If you'd like to donate a buck or two via paypal, that would be nice too! For any size donation, I'll send you an Internet Guide on the topic of your choice to include on your website. You can see my new site for [Guides To The Internet].

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You can also reach me privately with your questions at [my contact page]!

- Garnet

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