On 10/14/2010 09:35 AM, Preston Boyington 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.Mark wrote: <snipped>None of this matters if you use Clonezilla. So why even fiddle with it when there's a great alternative?I use Clonezilla a great deal, but most people don't think to make an image of the machine before they start Windows for the first time. What I'm talking about is having the ability to restore the machine to a factory state, with no personalization, in the event of your selling or passing it along to someone else. Doing this allows the new user to walk through the setup routine that is presented and personalize it to their taste.
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.