When I installed Windows 7 on my systems I decided to install fresh on all machines except my laptop which I upgraded.
This time I did it the other way round; I installed fresh on my laptop as it needed a clean out but, because I am using it extensively at the moment, I decided to upgrade my workstation.
Windows 8 has three options:
- A new Install – everything is wiped so you have to reinstall all of your programmes and data which, hopefully, you remembered to save somewhere
- Keep personal data – All programmes are wiped but you keep everything under your profile; i.e. all your documents and settings
- Upgrade – all programmes and personal data is kept
Although it takes time to re-install everything the first option is best as it gives the computer a clean-up getting rid of all that clutter everyone accumulates over time; however a good compromise is the second option if you want to keep all your favourites, documents, etc.
On my laptop I used Option 2 which worked quite well as I was installing Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012 anyway; I have 2 x 75GB drives (partitions) on the laptop and was always running short of space on the system drive, often down to 3-4GB so it was good to see, post installation of all the day – to – day software, close to 30GB of space. it seems strange talking about low disk space when I get down to 3GB when I think that my first disk drive was a whopping 10MB; yes that’s megabytes
On the workstation I used option 3; I haven’t had time to test everything yet but, as far as I can see, the only thing not working is the Cisco VPN software; hopefully all it needs is a re-install. I’ll see how it goes over the next few months but I may decide to do a full clean and install later in the year, probably coinciding with the Office 2013 release.
Alan's Place 