difference between a semi-clean install and a clean install?

hi.

I know vaios have a lot of bloatware, so i was looking through the guide but I don't really understand the difference between that tutorial and just simply reformatting?

Thanks.

 

With a semi-clean install, you use the system restore discs which came with the machine (or you made yourself from the recovery partition stuff) to reinstall, but you interrupt the process to avoid installing a lot of the extra rubbish that you don't want.

With a clean install, you just wipe everything and start again as with any usual OS install. You obviously would want to create the recovery discs anyway, just in case you need them later.

The advantage of the semi-clean is that you'll have a much better chance of all the hardware and widgets like Fn keys working as expected without much messing about. The disadvantage is that you might still get some rubbish software you don't want installing itself.

With a clean install, you'll get a fresh blank OS... so you'll need to manually install any useful drivers/utilities you want. You can probably save some pain driver-wise by slipstreaming drivers into the OS install, but any useful utilities you want will need installing by getting them from the Sony site or whatever. The advantage is you have complete control over what software gets installed. The problem with this method is you might need to spend longer fiddling around to obtain the right drivers/utilities and installing them in exactly the right order, before everything works properly...