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creating reinstall discs


John O

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When we bought our new HP desk top, it was suggested by HP that we create a set of re install discs. This would take about 11 DVD R discs and 17 CD R's. Could I just put this data on a USB flash memory? If so, how big a flash memory do we need to buy?

Thanks, John

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Your 3 essentials are:

1. A legitimate copy of your operating system on CD or DVD.

2. A backup of all your device drivers (latest versions of them).

3. A backup of your personal files.

If you have any software you like, make sure you have the latest version of it and store it on CD/DVD/flash/external. As for how large of a flash drive, 2 and 4GB sticks are very cheap nowadays. Only you can make the decision there.

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I think there must be a misunderstanding here. 11 DVDs would be 51 Gig and 17 CDs would be 12Gig, this is a huge amount of data for an out of the box PC. USB flash drives today are 4 Gig....

I guess they suggested that you keep your installation disks (that might be all those DVDs and CDs) in a safe place if you got them with the machine at first. You really don't need a 2nd backup of that as most of them softwares you will never reinstall anyway.

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The PC did not come with any install discs or software discs. (HP Pavilion a1410Y) When I set it up, it suggested that I create the discs. When I went to the wizard to do it, it said it required 17 CD R's. The PC does not have a DVD burner.

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The PC did not come with any install discs or software discs. (HP Pavilion a1410Y) When I set it up, it suggested that I create the discs. When I went to the wizard to do it, it said it required 17 CD R's. The PC does not have a DVD burner.

Well, that's untrue. That might be true if you're going to make an image of your drive contents as they are right now and uncompressed, but not the way you should do it. DVD Burners are dirt cheap nowadays. I prefer to get my image file down in size as much as possible. What I do is use a slightly nLited XP (just old crap and unneeded Drivers, Keyboad Layouts, Languages removed, nothing else as to leave all functionality in tact. Then I choose good software for each purpose I'll be using my PC for (which I've already done) and make sure all temp/cache has been cleaned. Image away. Some prefer Norton Ghost, some prefer Acronis True Image. I love the latter. My C drive is 4 GBs. My image file is under 1 GB and takes 5 minutes to restore my system incase of corruption (which rarely happens).

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