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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Guidelines for an efficient PC reformat

If you need to to reformat your computer, you need to remember some important guidelines in order to do it efficiently and correctly.

Guidelines:

#1. Before you start reformatting your PC, take a note and list down all important things you need to back-up. This includes important documents, files, and browser bookmarks. Put this in your external drive or flash drive. You must remember that reformatting is an ireversible process and all your data will be lost.

#2. Make sure you know all the names of your hardware components like sound card, video card, motherboard and LAN card. To do this you can refer to your device manager. Right click on "My Computer" ->properties ->hardware tab ->device manager. Your video card name can be found in "display adapters", sound card in "sound, video and game controllers" and LAN card in "network adapters". You can also use cpu-z to know you motherboard name and manufacturer and take note of the names. Next you need to download the installers for these devices. There are a lot available in the web just use your favorite search engine and key in "name of device+drivers". In choosing the download site, it is recommended to use the manufacturers website. If your reformatting a laptop, just go to their website and they'll have all the drivers you need for your laptop, just make sure you know the laptop model, you can also use cpu-z for this. Save the note you have taken for future reference and place all the drivers you've downloaded in your back-up.

#3 Make sure you have all the installers needed. The most important thing is your OS installer, make sure you also have the serial number. Check if you have important applications like MS Office and an anti-virus is also important. If you don't have one you can visit this shop for good deals.

The most common reasons why people reformat their PC's and possible preventive action :
1. PC flooded with virus/worms/spyware - install a reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware/malware
2. Slow PC performance - optimize your PC, read this post.
3. Errors, BSOD, sudden crash/restart - know the problem first, reformatting may not solve the problem. Try to read some tips here.

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