Who does a complete WIPE first thing?

I always hate all the crap that comes along with new machine. Most I'll never use, some are neat for a little while, and very few are essential.

I've always built my own machines and installed fresh OS's, so I never had to worry about new PC bloat. But this is my first laptop purchase (A8Js) and I understand some things are very proprietary (ie drivers, features, etc)

I'm a little disappointed that my OS purchase is really just a recovery disc, which I imagine will preload all the bloat if I tried to do a fresh install with them. Such a waste of a good XP Pro key.

So I want to do a fresh clean install, and since this is my first laptop, I'd like to know if people normally do this. There are some features I want to keep, but I believe those will be available to me with the ASUS drivers/utilities disc. Are there any snags I should think about before doing this?

Plus I want to do a dual boot, two XP Pro boots, one as my daily play OS, and the other will be optimized for writing and recording music. This should be straight forward just like any PC, right?

 

Yup, it should be pretty straight forward. All of the necessary drivers/utilities can be found on the Asus website download page (there aren't that many, really...)
Although to be honest, Asus Ensembles really don't come with THAT much bloat... especially when compared to other manufacturers.

 

I agree. There's not a whole lot of commercial crap on here. Just Skype and some other stuff. There's a LOT of tools which I don't need. I just freak out when I see 15 icons in my system tray.

I'm going to wipe it! Thanks

 

Skype and Norton - I'd uninstall, but I don't think they really require a format.

 

Your other option, which wouldn't take as much time/effort as a doing a reformat and reinstallation of all the OS and Asus drivers, etc (with the chance that you might miss something important to the notebook's various non-OS functions) would be to run MSCONFIG and simply disable the TSR services that are cluttering up your taskbar.

Ditto Justin's comment on Norton - it's way too big of a resource hog and there are other effective options out there, both subscription and free.

 

I wipe from front to back

 

Okay,

I'm going to try deleting apps, and msconfig startups. I'll play with it like it is for a while. I'm going to load my second boot now and see what kind of stuff I'll miss w/ a clean wipe.

I'm back to front... go figure

 

When i got my A8js on the 31st, i checked for dead pixels, then after that seemed ok, i formated the hard drive, got rid of recovery partition. reocovered using recovery disk, and when it asked for the drivers disk after the 2nd recovery disk just do a reboot and dont insert the driver disk.

Tthe driver disk is the cd that contains all the bloatware. if you dont insert it, ull just have a fresh XP Pro install without the ASUS stuff. after you get into XP. insert driver cd and select the drivers u want to install, like vid card, modem, and i think sound were the main ones that needed to be installed.

if you want the power4gear button and the splendid button just install those off the cd as well. otherwise u have a fresh install. I also used partition magic to split the drive 30/70 so if i ever need to do reformat itll just be on the 1st partition.

 

when i got my a8jm...first thing i did out of the box was format the hdd and install xp pro along with the necessary asus drivers.

 

I got an a8js as my first laptop too after building my own desktops.

I initially thought I should do a total reformat, but I think you should should play with the preconfigured setup a bit. This is especially useful for figuing out what drivers/utilities you actually want or need. Like people mentioned it isn't too bloated.

I'd clean out unwanted programs, install new ones, then do some diskclean up and degrafment like a fiend.

Speaking of which, anyone have a favorite free defragmentation software?

 

For sanitary reasons, I hope we ALL wipe from front to back... (especially women), but this is definitely going off topic

 

Are there any options for dumping the extra partition(s) without having to do a total reinstall or have data loss? I hate the idea of the space wasted in these partitions.

Thanks,

-Ryan

 

I think PartitionMagic will do the job.

For the record, I don't think I even booted into Windows when I got my A8Jm. I might have, but in all likelihood I just stuck in an XP Pro CD and installed it straight off the bat. I'm wishing I made a 30GB partition for music instead of a 25 GB one...I can't fill up my ipod

 

How big is the recovery partition?