Advice for reinstall of Win 7

[OurManInBananas]

Hi,

I am planning to completely reinstall Windows 7 from scratch next weekend.

I have run AutoPatcher and it downloaded a couple of gig of modules and other stuff for Office and Windows...

I just want to check what I need to do in order to make everything run smoothly next weekend.

So I just need to copy these downloads to my external hdd where all my backups are, then do a clean format and reinstall of Windows 7 64 bit from the disks that Dell say they sending me, and when ready, copy the Autopatcher folder back onto my C: drive and run AutoPatcher.exe to update Windows 7 and Flash, Reader etc...

Is that right?

thanks

[TheAPGuy]

Correction... make sure you get a download SP1 for Windows 7 as well (unless your install has SP1 in it.). That has to be installed first. Then you can run the updates from AP.

Steps:

• Format
• Install Windows 7
• Install Your drivers if you need to. (Video/Mouse/Keyboard/Touchscreen) Worry about sound and what not after the other steps
• Install SP1.
• Check things out after the SP1 install. Sometimes SP's don't install correctly. Mouse around and see if applications run fine. DON'T START UP IE in its current state it will NOT protect you!
• If you are running your external HDD though USB1 interface, (god help you, you poor soul), Copy the stuff over first. AP can take time to run MD5 Hash checks. As well as installs can be much slower as well since it will unpack to your primary HDD into a temp folder anyways.
• Run AP. Go with the chosen defaults. It will auto select the critical installs for you. When its done installing it will reboot. The estimated install times are just that... estimated and in some cases just copied over time value from a similar install.
• Run AP again. There may have been dependencies in there that needed other updates installed first before they could be installed. At this point you can choose to install other things as well. I recommend NOT selecting other things besides updates for your windows though until all the updates are installed. It will probably reboot for you.
• At this point you should have what ever update you need installed and you can select other things... .NET, Java, Adobe, Office (office updates are old), or what ever. Don't forget... if you install .NET you will need to reboot and install more updates for .NET... probably.
• Install non important drivers (sound, printer, Joystick)

[OurManInBananas]

thanks for your help... I think I'm my ports are USB 2 but I intend to copy everything over first anyway just in case!