re: Board recommended Hard Drive Imaging Software

quote:

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No disrespect intended but you can do much better. I do a bare metal refresh 2-3 times a year to make sure I can when I have to. I unplug the C drive, put it on my desk, plug in a new drive straight from the package, and I'm back to normal within just over one hour. My best time is 1:07, my worst is 1:23.

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I think that's a silly exercise to do 2-3 times year "just because". There is no value in it beyond trying to beat your personal best time, and why you would care I can't begin to fathom, and even it were useful, it's naive to compare your installation from scratch to others you have no knowledge of. For example, besides installing a number of large software packages, my installation includes around 40 Windows customizations besides merging numerous .reg files, manual changes involving things like gpedit.msc, various Control Panel applets, making sure Documents and other folders point to my data drive, etc, that I haven't bothered to figure out how to automate. I just have them all in a long list. It's a huge time-consuming PITA to do all this from scratch, and that's why I value imaging the way I do.