What to do now?

Hi guys,

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, downloaded all the drivers and software and got it all up and running perfectly...

My question is - what are good procedures to do once you install an OS? Like backups etc... If you could suggest any I would be very grateful!

Thanks,

Benji.

 

1. Remove unneeded Windows features
2. Create a limited user account
3. Disable QoS Scheduler (for the network)
4. Disable unneeded services
5. Disable indexing (unless you really use it)

 

Ignore all of the above EXCEPT item #2.

Until you use the OS for a while you'll have no idea which features and services are "needed" and even then its iffy that you'll REALLY know. These forums are full of threads with folks having problems that they can't figure out, only to discover a few pages of posts latter that it came down to them following advice by some "expert" who told them to disable this service, or that feature.

BTW indexing takes up a significant amount of CPU and IO to the disk ONLY when it initially creates its index. After that the ONLY time it does anything is when you add, edit or delete a file that is in the indexes scope. The only thing you might want to do re: indexing is check the scope of directories it is indexing.

Bottom line, is unless you have a compelling NEED don't mess around with services and features. The alleged gains are minimal at best and heartburn inducing at worst.

Gary

 

Get a hobby that utilizes your laptop in some way. I play COD4, download movies and work on my joomla website about travel.

 

Get an image of the C: partition, so that if anything happens, like you take some "expert" advice and delete some actually needed service (sorry I couldn't resist... big ol' grin...), you can easily get back to the current configuration in a matter of minutes. There are several apps around that can do this, Win7 even has some built in functionality for this. Get the image on an external store, a drive, an FTP site just somewhere off the drive itself.

I prefer to take this a step further and create a second partition on the hard drive and move ALL my data (including the Outlook PST file) to this new partition. I back that up on a daily basis (changes only of course) to an external hard drive. Combining these two ideas gives me a backup scheme that allows me to very quickly recover from any catastrophe that might arise. I redo my image of the C: partition periodically, after a bunch of system updates, new apps installed, old apps updated etc.

Gary

 

As ScuderiaConchiglia said, do only #2. Others could make sense in Vista, but not in W7. And even in Vista it made sense, only if you had bad hardware. Indexing is slow only the first time. And god, no, don't mess with services.
But you may try Startup Delayer to speed up your start up time if you got a lot of programs.

 

Second. Messing with services and features are only for enthusiasts. For productivity, it isn't worth it.

For example, lets say a tweak somehow saves you 1 second a day. Well, if you run into some show stopping bug 3 years later that takes about 30 mins of Googling to fix, then you'll have actually lost time due to the tweak. It's just that simple. Many of these "tweaks" have not been thoroughly tested on multiple hardware platforms.

Second. The sooner you start having fun, the better. The first thing I always do is load up some nice wallpaper.