If you simply must live life on the bleeding edge, and you don’t mind installing potentially buggy software on your system, you might be interested in the latest public beta release of Internet Explorer 7. I have not fully tested IE7 yet, but it has some features that I do like. Of course, tabbed browsing is something that should have been included in IE6, and is a much welcome addition to IE. In addition, there are some basic feed subscription features (RSS, etc) built-in, although it seems as though they could use some work before they become really useful. Also, there seems to be some anti-phishing technology built-in to the browser, but I haven’t activated it yet. Other than that, the interface is much, much different. As such, I will need some time with it before I can formulate an opinion on the changes.
Look, I love PCs, but even I am not dumb enough to install Microsoft Beta software on a production (home) machine. If you are determined to do this, for the love of all that is goodly, have a good backup.
No screenie? Waaaah!
Unfortunately, I installed it on my sis-in-law’s lappie, so no screening whilst I am on the PowerBook. But I will try to post one later.
So, how’s that lappie hard drive recovery going, Carl?
Course, I’m toying with the idea of a fresh XP install on my home pc after the fooking Visual C .Net Express installer hung and pegged my cpu. The _installer_. Just know I have no time to do it, unfortunately.
Probably a good idea to do a basic XP install (with service pack 2, etc), office, and some basic applications. After getting it just right, creating an image of the install and storing it on your network (or burn it to DVD). Then when crappy-ass MS software hoses your install again, restoring from the image is a snap.
Out of curiosity, what would you use to do the image? Just tar/zip up the c: drive?
Eek, jeebus no. To quote Diablo… “Come friend, sit awhile and listen.”
On a windows XP machine, there are several sets of files that normally don’t zip. Aside from that, their attributes probably wouldn’t be preserved. And beyond that, you can’t zip the Master Boot Record.
I recommend building a machine with multiple partitions or hard drives. On C:, for a standard Windows XP install with any apps you might want to install, you should set the partition size to 20 gigs. This assumes you’ll be storing all your files and docs on another drive or partition.
Install Windows, MS Office, anti-virus, messenger, your favorite browser(s), Photoshop… anything you want. Set your bookmarks, install all your drivers. During this set-up… don’t surf the web or introduce any crap to your machine. You want it as pristine as a the virgins of yore. Make sure you install SP 2, and all the latest critical patches.
Once all this is done, and your machine is at a point where you want to rush off and race with it, break out a trusty bootable CD (I prefer the ones made using BartPE) that has the GHOST32.EXE executable off Ghost version 7.5 (at least, as it is the only one that can deal with the version of NTFS included with XP). Boot off the CD, launch ghost, and image the partition C: to an image which you will store on a separate partition or drive.
Once the image is done, reboot to windows, burn the image to DVD, and put it away with your bootable CD.
I know you know most of these steps, Dave, but for our readers, I was trying to be thorough.
Oh, and I have a premade BartPE disc with the necessary executables. I can bring one with me to our next game on Saturday.
Maybe I’ll just use a linux boot disk and dd the whole disk off.
dd should work as well, but I imagine that Ghost has some added functionailty that you might not get with dd.
The interweb never fails me. Found a pair of free tools to do the same trick, both seem to be more intelligent about it than dd would be. Partimage is a linux utility, and g4u is a netbsd-based bootcd. I’m probably going to to go with partimage, mostly because I don’t have another box at home with a big disk to use as a ftp server.
Also, I just remembered I have another 20gb u2w scsi drive I pulled a while back that I can just do a clean install onto and keep.