A post-reinstall checklist for Windows 10

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa After a Win10 reinstall, the order in which you set up a PC’s drivers, updates, apps, and data can fundamentally affect its st
[See the full post at: A post-reinstall checklist for Windows 10]

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abbodi86, lmacri, Fred

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Thank you, very precious. I will keep it for a rainyday;
Still “struggling” to remove some “dirty spots” the old fashioned hard way; this became  somekind of a weird hobby.

* _ ... _ *

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3) Run Windows Update

Depending on how recently you obtained your Windows reinstallation files, and where Microsoft is in its updating cycle, your new setup might need new patches right from the get-go.

Navigate through Settings/Windows Update and then click Check for updates. Let Windows install any updates your system requires.

NEVER click on check for update.

Follow PKCano’s AKB2000016 guide for update settings.

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Fred

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Fred lists Paragon Backup & Restore as having only a paid version and a 30 day demo.

Not true!

Paragon Software has Community Editions of both their Backup and Restore and their excellent Partition Manager which are completely free for home use.

https://www.paragon-software.com/about/products-a-to-z/#free

I have used many different Paragon programs over the past 20 years (!!!) and have found them invariably to be rock solid, unlike, say, Acronis products.

While I mostly rely on Paragon Hard Disk Manager to back up my work computers, in part because of unmatched support for virtualization, I would recommend Macrium free edition for most users.

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Fred

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What about defragging the disk(s) as well.

Many years ago I was surprised with the amount of fragmentation on a new windows installation.

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A couple of notes about the process:

If your old Windows 10 setup was the result of an upgrade from Windows 7, you have the Windows DVD player.  After doing the clean install, you will not.  Easiest way to remedy this, if you want to continue playing DVDs, is to install the latest VLC (videolan.org).

If you are using the built-in Windows security (and probably even if you are using a third-party program), you will want to re-check the Windows security icon in the tray every few days.  I have found it usually requires action (or dismissing the warning) 3 or 4 separate times over the course of installing and rebooting.

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This is the second article I’ve read that recommends several tools for doing a Windows 10 system image.  Windows itself has a “Backup and Restore (Windows 7)” tool that is available in Windows 10 Update & Security/Backup, which states that is works in Win 10.  Is there any reason that this should not be used?

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As a long time user of imaging software, starting with Norton’s Ghost, then on to Acronis, I have found Acronis to be rock solid. I haven’t been chasing each new release. If you have Acronis 2014 or newer you can image, clone, and restore any Acronis backup image. Acronis is available for free from various oems. If you use a 2014 or newer version of Acronis it can handle UEFI or BIOS firmware. Acronis 2013, plus a patch, was the transition to UEFI. For a new user they can use the free oem versions of Acronis. The current oem versions are a year or so older than the current commercial version, but they are at least Acronis 2016 or newer and there is n o time limit. If you are using a drive made or owned by Seagate or Western Digital there are free versions of Acronis that support the essential functions. Western digital is here, and Seagate is here. As long as you have one brand of their drive connected to the system, internally or externally, you can run the oem Acronis regardless of which drive is backed up to any other drive.

There are other OEMs that have a free version of Acronis for cloning your old drive to their new products.

Acronis will backup the newest drives with Optane memory in a Raid configuration from Windows. Since the restore is from an offline/Linux version of Acronis, and since Linux doesn’t have a driver for the Intel software raid for Optane memory, Acronis won’t restore… but wait, just go to the bios, change raid to AHCI, make the restore, then switch back to raid.

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WSGeoffH wrote:

What about defragging the disk(s) as well.

Many years ago I was surprised with the amount of fragmentation on a new windows installation.

Windows 10 has a scheduled defrag of HDDs, SSDs.

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Defrag does nothing for unless you have a really old system with a really slow disk and even then you may only see a slight speed improvement. The best speed improvement is more RAM if you have less than 4GB and an SSD on any system.

cheers, Paul

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