Comment Unattended Installer (Score 1) 463
Completely reinstalling Windows and my applications takes me just a few hours.
I used nLite to create a custom windows installer which includes SP2 and ALL the latest security updates, my drivers, my preferences (services, registry tweaks), and excludes WMP and other useless crap. Many programs will run without registry (for instance, Firefox after setting up your old profile with the -profilemanager). Custom batch files install my local Apache/MySQL servers. A little foresight goes a long way when it comes to reinstalls.
All this has taken a decent chunk of time to learn and debug (still having issues with some WMV since I removed WMP, but solutions exist), but I like to run a clean, barebones machine; my C drive (incl. Windows, Program Files) has less than 800 MB used. I have just 12 background processes (including NOD32) and I unregister unnecessary DLLs. I manually manage my explorer context menus from registry for complete control: Things I use are readily accessible and things I don't aren't creating clutter.
Of course, all the potential productivity benefit is squandered by all the tweaking I continue to do ;) But I also do it for (competitive) gaming. Lacking a powerful machine, CS gets a little choppy (and drives me crazy) if I let my machine go.
I used nLite to create a custom windows installer which includes SP2 and ALL the latest security updates, my drivers, my preferences (services, registry tweaks), and excludes WMP and other useless crap. Many programs will run without registry (for instance, Firefox after setting up your old profile with the -profilemanager). Custom batch files install my local Apache/MySQL servers. A little foresight goes a long way when it comes to reinstalls.
All this has taken a decent chunk of time to learn and debug (still having issues with some WMV since I removed WMP, but solutions exist), but I like to run a clean, barebones machine; my C drive (incl. Windows, Program Files) has less than 800 MB used. I have just 12 background processes (including NOD32) and I unregister unnecessary DLLs. I manually manage my explorer context menus from registry for complete control: Things I use are readily accessible and things I don't aren't creating clutter.
Of course, all the potential productivity benefit is squandered by all the tweaking I continue to do
