Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
This morning I found myself writing up a guide to putting together a new computer, specifically for the tasks that needed to happen post-Windows install.
It strikes me that this is a conversation we've never had, so let me ask you all what you guys do before you consider a build finished.
The person I was writing to has an SSD and a traditional hard drive, which was the basis for some of this, though that should be obvious from the content.
Here's the stuff I came up with:
OK do me a favor and don't do things on the computer that are unrelated to configuration until you get a decent baseline set of applications installed and all your other stuff in place. There are a few tasks that you should probably do.
The goal here is to get everything in your computer in good order so that we can make a backup of the machine in a pristine state, with all the configuration changes we need well in hand and no chance that there's anything bad or malicious installed. So stay out of Farmville and in fact off the web as much as possible until you've done these steps.
1. Make a folder on your C: drive. Name it Drivers or something. Copy the DVD that came with your motherboard into that folder. You honestly don't need the whole thing if you want to be picky. Probably not the folder full of old versions of applications, for example.
When you download the drivers for your Video card (note: Download the video driver; the one on the CD is a million years old and not current) and any printer you might use, you can toss those in that folder as well. It's just handy to keep that stuff on hand so you don't have to waste 20 minutes looking for and downloading that crap at some point in the future.
Go ahead and install all your drivers in whatever manner pleases you. I like doing a manual install off the Gigabyte DVD since that's less work than actually going through the folders and finding the drivers or setup files by hand, buthe auto-install puts some crap on the computer that I don't like. Check Control Panel > System Properties > Device Manager to make sure you don't have any question mark or exclamation point items.
2. Use Ninite to get a basic set of applications installed. You know what you use more than I do, though I suggest Avast for antivirus, Foxit for PDF reading, everything under Runtimes and not bothering with the version of Spybot Search and Destroy because Ninite's version installs stupid TeaTimer. Save the Ninite Executable someplace (like, hey, the drivers folder you made).
Go in to Scheduled Tasks (click start and search for it) and set up a Basic Task to run Ninite every so often. Weekly is fine. Whatever.
You might also use this opportunity to install Office or other commercial applications and make sure your computer is all updated and crap. Also go ahead and install Adblock.
You might also want to install Spybot Search and Destroy (don't forget to turn off Teatimer during the install because it is sucky and awful) and SpywareBlaster (the manual updating version is fine). Go ahead install those and then do their Immunization procedures. Get them from Majorgeeks or something. Download.com went completely retarded a couple weeks ago and now they've bundled this stupid updater tool with everything. It's stupid and should be avoided. But Spybot and Spywareblaster both do good stuff for you.
(As an after-the-fact modification: I also have a stupid little script that copies SpaceMonger and Hijack This on to a PC, putting shortcuts to those things useful places, and grabs the latest MVPS.org hosts file. )
Also don't forget to register Avast.
Don't worry about Games or your personal files just yet.
3. Connect whatever extra hard drives you're going to connect.
I don't recommend having multiple hard drives connected during install time because the Windows installer will invariably stick the System (recovery) partition on a different drive from the disk where Windows is installed.
The program for managing them is technically called Disk Management, but the easiest place to find it is by Right-clicking on Computer on the start menu and then going to Manage. There's a wizard that will help you initialize the disks, but if you mess up or want to change things, you can make the changes you need by either right-clicking the disk itself (Disk 0, Disk 1 etc) or on the space to the right of that, which shows the structure of the drive space.
Quick formats are OK because a complete format can take a really long time on a 2TB drive.
4. Once that's done, it's time to move the default save location for stuff to one of your hard drives. Windows 7 has a feature called Libraries, which tell it where to save different kinds of stuffs. You can make your own Libraries if you'd like, or modify the ones that are there already.
Open Windows Explorer. Libraries should be what's in the Folder pane on the right. Right click on Documents, choose Properties. Click Include a Folder.
Navigate to your other drive. Personally, I suggest making a folder called Denise or something and creating your Library folders (Docs, Images, Music, Video) under that, but it's up to you. Anyway, once you've pointed things where you want them, click OK.
Back in Documents Properties, highlight your new folder selection under Library Locations. Click Set Save Location.
OK so do that same process for each of the other libraries. I have a couple extra ones for myself - I have a library called Wallpapers, one called Camera Pictures and one called Hot Chicks, because those are categories of things I save a lot.
If you download a lot of stuff, it's also useful to move your default download location in each of the web browsers you use so that you're not saving tons of crap on your SSD. Downloads are not a Library by default, but they ARE a Favorite folder on the left-side of your default Windows Explorer view, and that should carry over and show up everywhere.
So you'll want to Google up instructions for how to make sure that IE, Firefox and Chrome are all pointing to the right place. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and right click and Delete the Downloads folder from your Windows Explorer favorites list.
Having done that, just navigate to where you want downloads to go and drag that folder up on to the Favorites pane. You can also add other folders to that list any time you want. Mine is full of network locations.
5. Once all this configuration stuff is done and in order, you're going to want to make an initial backup of your system's configuration. Personally, I prefer to do this without adding user data, because I'd rather not wait for 200GB of music and pictures to restore when I'm trying to get a computer working.
I suggest using Acronis TrueImage for that purpose. TrueImage has its own bootable restore system and stuff. It's really, really handy and more functional than the backup software that comes with Windows.
Seagate, Maxtor and WD have a limited-use version of TrueImage available on their respective web sites, but it's worth $30 to buy it, too.
Whatever. Save your backup to at least your second hard drive, and if you're feeling at all paranoid, stick it on an external drive as well. The backup size should be around 10 - 15GB, though the program may tell you it's a lot more than that and the size of stuff on your drive will certainly be a lot bigger than that.
6. With the initial backup taken care of, you're probably in a good place to Easy Transfer your stuff back to your computer and get your games and suchlike installed. At this point you should be good to go for all that stuff.
It strikes me that this is a conversation we've never had, so let me ask you all what you guys do before you consider a build finished.
The person I was writing to has an SSD and a traditional hard drive, which was the basis for some of this, though that should be obvious from the content.
Here's the stuff I came up with:
OK do me a favor and don't do things on the computer that are unrelated to configuration until you get a decent baseline set of applications installed and all your other stuff in place. There are a few tasks that you should probably do.
The goal here is to get everything in your computer in good order so that we can make a backup of the machine in a pristine state, with all the configuration changes we need well in hand and no chance that there's anything bad or malicious installed. So stay out of Farmville and in fact off the web as much as possible until you've done these steps.
1. Make a folder on your C: drive. Name it Drivers or something. Copy the DVD that came with your motherboard into that folder. You honestly don't need the whole thing if you want to be picky. Probably not the folder full of old versions of applications, for example.
When you download the drivers for your Video card (note: Download the video driver; the one on the CD is a million years old and not current) and any printer you might use, you can toss those in that folder as well. It's just handy to keep that stuff on hand so you don't have to waste 20 minutes looking for and downloading that crap at some point in the future.
Go ahead and install all your drivers in whatever manner pleases you. I like doing a manual install off the Gigabyte DVD since that's less work than actually going through the folders and finding the drivers or setup files by hand, buthe auto-install puts some crap on the computer that I don't like. Check Control Panel > System Properties > Device Manager to make sure you don't have any question mark or exclamation point items.
2. Use Ninite to get a basic set of applications installed. You know what you use more than I do, though I suggest Avast for antivirus, Foxit for PDF reading, everything under Runtimes and not bothering with the version of Spybot Search and Destroy because Ninite's version installs stupid TeaTimer. Save the Ninite Executable someplace (like, hey, the drivers folder you made).
Go in to Scheduled Tasks (click start and search for it) and set up a Basic Task to run Ninite every so often. Weekly is fine. Whatever.
You might also use this opportunity to install Office or other commercial applications and make sure your computer is all updated and crap. Also go ahead and install Adblock.
You might also want to install Spybot Search and Destroy (don't forget to turn off Teatimer during the install because it is sucky and awful) and SpywareBlaster (the manual updating version is fine). Go ahead install those and then do their Immunization procedures. Get them from Majorgeeks or something. Download.com went completely retarded a couple weeks ago and now they've bundled this stupid updater tool with everything. It's stupid and should be avoided. But Spybot and Spywareblaster both do good stuff for you.
(As an after-the-fact modification: I also have a stupid little script that copies SpaceMonger and Hijack This on to a PC, putting shortcuts to those things useful places, and grabs the latest MVPS.org hosts file. )
Also don't forget to register Avast.
Don't worry about Games or your personal files just yet.
3. Connect whatever extra hard drives you're going to connect.
I don't recommend having multiple hard drives connected during install time because the Windows installer will invariably stick the System (recovery) partition on a different drive from the disk where Windows is installed.
The program for managing them is technically called Disk Management, but the easiest place to find it is by Right-clicking on Computer on the start menu and then going to Manage. There's a wizard that will help you initialize the disks, but if you mess up or want to change things, you can make the changes you need by either right-clicking the disk itself (Disk 0, Disk 1 etc) or on the space to the right of that, which shows the structure of the drive space.
Quick formats are OK because a complete format can take a really long time on a 2TB drive.
4. Once that's done, it's time to move the default save location for stuff to one of your hard drives. Windows 7 has a feature called Libraries, which tell it where to save different kinds of stuffs. You can make your own Libraries if you'd like, or modify the ones that are there already.
Open Windows Explorer. Libraries should be what's in the Folder pane on the right. Right click on Documents, choose Properties. Click Include a Folder.
Navigate to your other drive. Personally, I suggest making a folder called Denise or something and creating your Library folders (Docs, Images, Music, Video) under that, but it's up to you. Anyway, once you've pointed things where you want them, click OK.
Back in Documents Properties, highlight your new folder selection under Library Locations. Click Set Save Location.
OK so do that same process for each of the other libraries. I have a couple extra ones for myself - I have a library called Wallpapers, one called Camera Pictures and one called Hot Chicks, because those are categories of things I save a lot.
If you download a lot of stuff, it's also useful to move your default download location in each of the web browsers you use so that you're not saving tons of crap on your SSD. Downloads are not a Library by default, but they ARE a Favorite folder on the left-side of your default Windows Explorer view, and that should carry over and show up everywhere.
So you'll want to Google up instructions for how to make sure that IE, Firefox and Chrome are all pointing to the right place. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and right click and Delete the Downloads folder from your Windows Explorer favorites list.
Having done that, just navigate to where you want downloads to go and drag that folder up on to the Favorites pane. You can also add other folders to that list any time you want. Mine is full of network locations.
5. Once all this configuration stuff is done and in order, you're going to want to make an initial backup of your system's configuration. Personally, I prefer to do this without adding user data, because I'd rather not wait for 200GB of music and pictures to restore when I'm trying to get a computer working.
I suggest using Acronis TrueImage for that purpose. TrueImage has its own bootable restore system and stuff. It's really, really handy and more functional than the backup software that comes with Windows.
Seagate, Maxtor and WD have a limited-use version of TrueImage available on their respective web sites, but it's worth $30 to buy it, too.
Whatever. Save your backup to at least your second hard drive, and if you're feeling at all paranoid, stick it on an external drive as well. The backup size should be around 10 - 15GB, though the program may tell you it's a lot more than that and the size of stuff on your drive will certainly be a lot bigger than that.
6. With the initial backup taken care of, you're probably in a good place to Easy Transfer your stuff back to your computer and get your games and suchlike installed. At this point you should be good to go for all that stuff.
