Asus G1S :: Should I do a clean install of Vista or XP? How?

Last month, I picked up an Asus G1S (T7300 @ 2.00 Ghz) from the local Best Buy. After removing bloatware, I bumped the Windows Experience Index up to 4.8.

It's a great little machine, and I'm very pleased for the most part, but it has been increasingly unstable lately. According to Vista's system performance monitor, reliability has plummeted to 2.3. It crashes almost once a day, and sometimes hangs on the most simple disk operations (e.g. moving or deleting files).

I've run the diagnostics, and all of the hardware components pass with flying colors. I'd like to reformat the hard drive and start with a clean install, and have a few questions for the collective wisdom of these forums:

1. I can't find a system restore DVD. Is a disk supposed to ship with this unit, or are users expected to manually create the restore disks, as they do with Sony notebooks? It's possible that I just misplaced the restore disk.

2. If I *do* use the system restore disks, is that technically a clean install? Won't it put all of the bloatware junk back on my system? Do I actually need to buy a new copy of Vista in order to do a clean install?

3. I have a copy of XP installation disks from an old Dell Inspiron 2600. I basically fried that notebook when installing Ubuntu on it, so the XP license number is out of circulation. Would it theoretically be possible and legal to install XP on the Asus G1S with that old disk?

4. If I'm going through this painful clean install process, should I just fall back to XP in the hope of performance gains? As a side note, I should mention that I'm perfectly comfortable reformatting and reinstalling operating systems every six months or so. I figure that this is like the 21st century equivalent of polishing the chrome on one's car.

Thanks in advance for your advice. One way or another, I need to clean up this machine and make it perform like the powerhouse it is.

Aaron

 

To my knowledge, ASUS only ships actual Windows media, not restore/recovery discs. If they label it as recovery, it's just a name, not an actual recovery disc that flashes all the bloat back on.

You should be able to install your old copy of XP, PROVIDED it's not one of those copies that will only work on a Dell computer (I had a Dell XP CD like that). Just make sure you can find XP drivers first.

 

don't forget to install reliable system restore software (ei. Rollback Rx).

it save me a lot of time unistalling/reinstalling buggy software, specially Vista OS.

after you do clean install, do a back up of your clean system....once you install faulty Asus driver or corrupted Games software that cause BSOD you just need to restore your previous clean system that's it, all faulty driver or corrupted software is gone.

take my advise and you will your precious time to a lot of buggy software.

 

This is incorrect. ASUS ships their ensembles with recovery CDs or DVD that contain an image of the Windows OS. You are however correct in saying that "All the bloat" (which is not really so much compared to other brands) is not included on that image, but is installed separately during the recovery process. That step can be avoided by not inserting the driver and app CD when it is requested during recovery, and just restarting the computer instead.

I think when you buy ASUS from bestbuy you really don't get a recovery DVD... There is also no builtin option to make a disk out of the recovery partition.

If you do use then, you can avoid the bloatware by not inserting the drivers and app CD when requested to do so, see my message above. However, if you don't have the disks... you can't do that since everything is on the recovery partition and will get installed by default.

Possible: It depends if the XP installation verifies the hardware configuration of the computer. Edit: you will probably also need drivers for SATA on the CD. There are some procedures here on the forum on how to put those on the Windows CD.
Legal: Unsure, depends on the license maybe it only works with a Dell. But personally, I would install it and not care about it... it's "legal enough" for me.

Personally, I would go back to XP in an instant. Other people might not. It's up to you really... fancy UI and doubtful security improvement, versus compatibility, speed, and less resources taken up by the OS. (yeah, I know I'm biased )