Installing Windows

Tips for Reinstalling Windows:

Download all your drivers and save them to a flash drive or burn them to a CD before you reinstall windows, that way you they'll be handy, and you won't have to go looking for them to have the correct resolution on your screen or to allow your DVD-Burner to function.

Before you install windows and the option appears to create a partition, create an extra partition for your data, so if you ever need to recover data, you'll be able to. This should help speed up the process of reinstalling windows later, since essential drivers and software can be saved to the separate partition.

From my experience, you can create this extra partition now, however you have to wait until windows is installed to format it. Double click on the partition in My Computer and it should prompt you to format it. It's best to format it FAT32, because it's readable by more OSes. A 26 GB partition took about 20 min. to format in FAT32 without the "quick option" on my laptop.

After reinstalling Windows. . . . .
here are some settings you may want to change:

• Show file extensions
• Set automatic updates to download automatically, but select "let me choose when to install them"
• Disable error reporting
  (WindowsKey + Pause), click on Advanced at the bottom and disable the error reporting
• Add the volume icon to the system tray
  
• Remove Windows Media Player from music/video files associations
• Adjust the your scheduled anti-virus scans
• Change the location of the My Documents folder
  (Right-click the My Documents folder, choose Properties, select the Target tab, and click Move to transfer your current My Documents folder and its contents to another location (see Figure 5). To make My Documents point to an existing folder, click Find Target instead of Move.)