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Try using Print Friendly. Its a great tool that I use often and works very well for this type of situation.

For any experimentation that needs to be done, why not install VPC and experiment away with some of the suggestions in this post. All the benefits with no risks should something go awry. You simply exit out of VPC and say “No” to saving any changes and start all over again.

I just did some work on my cousins computer and asked myself the same question. So here is what I did…

My cousin had a top of the line Toshiba Satellite multi-media laptop that she purchased last Christmas. It came installed with Windows Vista. Over the course of the year they managed to destroy the operating system. It had several viruses, every IE toolbar add on you could imagine, it took about 2 years to boot up, you couldn’t install Vista SP2 and it would not shut down without having to perform a hard shut down via the power button. I didn’t want to even begin to trouble shoot the issues one by one and just decided to use the bootable partition and re-image the hard drive.

I backed up all there data via DriveImageXML and was going to start the re-image process when they called and asked my opinion on Windows 7. I had already installed Windows 7 on another machine and played around with it and I gave it good reviews. My opinion was enough, they liked what they heard and asked if I could install it?

So here I am; Windows 7 disc in the machine and ready to start my fresh install. Yes, I wanted to blow away the Vista OS and chose not to perform an upgrade. I am at the point of deciding if I want to partition the hard drive and to my surprise I discovered that the laptop had 2 physical hard drives (each was 120GB). So I had to rethink my strategy and this is what I decided to go with.

Hard Disk 0 had the Vista OS and the bootable partition to revert back to the factory OS if need be. I wanted to leave them with the option of going back to Vista (as crazy as that sounds) if they wanted to so I chose note to delete that partition. I did, however, delete the OS partition and installed Windows 7 to that.

Hard Disk 1 I reformatted using NTFS (for some strange reason it was formatted with FAT32). After configuring Windows 7 exactly the way I wanted I used Clonezilla to cloneghost the OS and pointed the OS backup to Hard Disk 1. I also installed backup software on Windows 7 and pointed the backup to Hard Disk 1.

My cousin was left with Windows 7 as her primary OS, the bootable partition if she wanted to go back to Vista , a clone of the Windows 7 OS and a set it and forget backup solution. This way, if she ever comes back to me needing help again (which no doubt she will) I have a number of different options I can take to help her.