Fresh install VS Stock

All my life, as opposed to what people do, which is buy a new laptop, and use the darn thing. The moment I buy a new laptop, I wipe the built in partition for recovery, and I format the laptop, then perform a clean Windows Install because I don't want to uninstall all the bundled crapware and end up with a dirty registry especially if it had an antivirus built in such as Norton or McAfee

Please tell me was I always doing the right thing? I usually just grab the drivers from the manufacturer's website and then install them myself.

Is it still the same these days? shall I continue this practice on my future laptop also?

What do you do?

 

When I got a new laptop, I just reformat everything

I do not like the uninstall approach because there are always files left behind unless I use a program such as revo uninstaller.

 

I do the same thing. Then I image the fresh OS so I always have my own "recovery disk."

 

Format the hell outta the new machine!!!

 

its in my sig

seriously though i think the reason many 'newbies' have issues is they come on here and everyone says yeah just format and re-install then they miss a driver or whatever and have issues and think its a major problem when it is not

forgot to mention like josea below....before i ever boot the machine i make an image....originally got this idea from Scott_RC-TEK

 

As usual I am the devil's advocate. I create an image to an external hard drive so I can recover easily to factory specs (handy if the restore partiton does not work or the hard drive fails). Then I use msconfig to disable AMAP, and remove whatever programs I don't use.
GR8 point ray4jc.
I am not obsessed with synthetic benchmarks or world record FPS.

 

Reinstall, of course.

Get a fresh copy of Windows 7 with SP1 from my sig.

MS should put some pressure on the manufacturers, the bloatware really destroys their reputation.

I've seen laptops from Asus and HP that offered great alternatives for newbies though.

The Asus laptop had plenty of bloat, but when I used the recovery DVDs it just installed Windows and drivers. Neat.

The HP netbook had 55 GB of occupied space, but for some reason I could NEVER get the WLAN to work after a clean install.
When I tried the recovery DVDs I saw the "Minimal install" option and tried it.
The result was again a clean install with all the drivers, the only difference was the C:\swsetup, 5 GB large, which I deleted.

I tried the same with a Sony laptop, but the recovery made no difference, still 90 processes.. Out of the box, the WLAN didn't even work, and the USB BT module I had could not be recognized or installed.
A clean install fixed everything.

 

I agree, if the person isn't really technical or wouldn't want to spend 4-6 hours formatting, reinstalling the drivers and installing stuff. I wouldn't recommend reformatting.


Personally though I'd reformat everything on my end and just install what I feel is necessary.

 

Edit: Ok, time to sleep..

 

What I usually do for people is use the computer out the box to download drivers and do a few updates, just to see how well the computer responds to doing more than a few things at once, and if I think its slow enough I can usually have a reformat done with all the drivers installed in an hour max (I've only had it take longer than an hour on some netbooks).

Most of the time I usually end up reformatting it anyway though.

 

I really don't understand why people want to kill off the factory recovery partition. Your telling me you really can't do without that extra 10Gb of space? It's so much easier to factory restore it when you go to sell it.

 

Alright then guys, I guess what I was doing in the past is right which is to format as soon as I get the laptop.

Thanks for your input

 

That's a great idea. I've also had done that when I bought my lappy, just in case .
And then made a clean install .

 

The extra space used is the least of the problem, unless you have a small SSD. Personally I prefer System Image, it does the same job. Combine it with sysprep if you want to sell.