My laptop (Vista Home Premium) is 2 years old now and I've notice the startup times being somewhat lengthy (convinced it wasn't always so) so I think it might be time for a clean install.

I've found my blank DVD's out to write selected directories out, but thinking it might be a whole heap easier /quicker (and safer) to buy an external hard-drive and sue this. Currently I have about 120Gb used on a 160gb drive.

Any suggestions as to software to use for backing up (anything free or bundled with a hard-drive?)…does the software copy every file on the system including system directories (is it worth considering incremental backups after the fresh install).

Any hard-drives to look out for or avoid ? (USB2 I guess)

thanks (unless you are suggesting I install some Linux system or Mac OS)

depends what your trying to back up, if your lappy is slow poss it could be a virus or summit, you backing up to an external HDD , then transfering it all back again will put you back to square one mate, the virus back on your lappy,
im just a mechanic , so an adult will be along soon to better explain things , just how i see it.
cheers

it's just startup (possibly shutdown) which feels slow…I've just installed so many bits of junk over time. Should (!) be virus free as I have always been running anti-virus (currently avast but previously AVG then Kapersky)…

question I suppose is what software is available and what benefit does it offer…if I had an external drive I guess I can just drag my C drive over to the new drive (and wait a couple of hours whilst it copies…erm…except Vista sometimes likes to take it's time copying files !!!)

best advice mate from me , unistale all your stuff you dont want, games , old programes etc etc , i only use avg free , and windows firewall never had a major prob, use window washer, followed by a good anti virus scan, then do a windows defrag or use O&O defrag, (which is better). then se how you go from there , bloody hell weres this adult gone to explain things better.

ta – I'll check O&O defrag- I've just found 'Backup and Restore Center' in Vista (although unsure how functional it is in Vista Home Premium)…sounds like it would do the backup job if I bought another drive…might try a cleanup for a starter.

I might get a better response in the week when the IT Crowd are in!

(I am not the IT crowd or a grown-up) 🙂

External drives are good & so are backups – if you have anything important on your computer (esp laptop since more likely to drop etc ?)

BAckup program – I have used syncback (free, seems to work just fine though a bit fiddly to set up if you don't know your terminology). There's also a thing called synctoy that I think is microsoft's freebie. The main thing seems to be deciding what NOT to back up (mine's got a bigger disc but took about 12hrs to back up, a lot of which wasn't important to me).

With XP you seem to lose all your updates when you reinstall, so end up having to download SP3 again (one reason I took a punt on windows 7). Might be same for Vista ??

If you're only doing it once & not going to back up repeatedly, I guess copy & paste/ drag & drop would do (& maybe work faster) but backup programs make the next times much faster as they only back up files that have changed.

get a decent sized external HDD and use Fabs auto backup – it does what it says on the tin – tell it to save to the external HDD – it will get your Docs, Desktop etc.

If you have saved anything on the root of C: or any where outside your user profile, you'd have to manually copy that to the exernal HDD.

I doubt that all that 120gb is actually your data – a lot of it will be the O/S. have a look for a little prog called Spacemonger – it'll show you where the bulk of your data is.

Have you get your Restore disks or does the laptop have a recovery partition that it will use to re-install the O/S from?

No disks just recovery partition (6.55GB with 2GB free (why?))…although I think there is an option to create disks (which I will do). [It's an HP pavilion laptop]

I think the shadow copy stuff on Vista is eating up loads of space (which is silly when, as far as I can gather, the home editions do not allow you to restore previous versions of files !
Spacemonger sounds like something I have been after..I'll give it a spin tomorrow.

1TB drives (Seagate or Western Digital) £68 on Amazon..sounds ideal…

'night

I've got a freecom 1tb external – found some good reviews when I bought & seems fine (but then I guess they all do, until…)