Re: Partitioning a drive with Windows 7 already installed

[Mark <mamarcac@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:53 AM, Gilbert Sullivan <whirlygig@comcast.net> wrote:

A very good point. I was going to mention that the restore discs provided by some vendors (via this method of creating them using a utility provided by the vendor) will let you perform a clean OS installation which omits some or all of the "extraneous" or third party software that comes with the factory image. That's a very nice feature since, otherwise, I'll just be buying another license and doing a clean installation without the cr*pola added by the OEM anyway.

It also lets any subsequent owner of the system get a nice, clean Windows image (well, as nice and clean as they get) on the system.

I don't use Windows on any personal systems these days, but it was surely nice to have the option of an installation without all of the weird stuff added by the computer maker because of all of those sweetheart deals with their business partners.

The last laptop I bought for a friend was a Toshiba some 5 years ago.  Their recovery partition/backup utility included virtually all of the crapware - even the trial version of Office 2003 - maybe things are different now.  I suppose YMMV depending on vendor, etc., but for the OP I would definitely do a full disk image with Clonezilla regardless of what choice he makes with the built-in recovery options.  Then all he needs to do is change user name possibly before selling if he restores from backup Clonezilla image, if that day comes.

Just my $0.02, especially since the last Windows 7 disk image I made with Clonezilla took 15 minutes, it seems like a good idea regardless if you ever use it or not.