There comes a time in every Windows user’s life when things start to feel slower. Perhaps you’ve been installing and uninstalling a ton of applications, or you’ve been mucking around with obscure Windows settings (or worse, the registry). Maybe you even decided to live life on the wild side, like me, and signed up for…
There comes a time in every Windows user’s life when things start to feel slower. Perhaps you’ve been installing and uninstalling a ton of applications, or you’ve been mucking around with obscure Windows settings (or worse, the registry). Maybe you even decided to live life on the wild side, like me, and signed up for Microsoft’s Windows Insider program, which recently caused my desktop system to screech to a halt. Whoops.
No matter the reason, it never hurts to give Windows 10 a top-to-bottom refresh–a new, clean installation of the OS, that is. Yes, you’ll have to reinstall your apps and set up your accounts again, but that doesn’t take as much time as you think. And there are plenty of ways to make this process as painless as possible.
If you’re forgetful, make a list of your installed programs
My annual (or whenever) Windows 10 reinstall is a great time to clean house. I tend to avoid writing down or generating lists of the programs I’ve installed on my system prior to the wipe-and-reinstall. Why? If I can’t remember to install an app when I’m staring at a fresh copy of Windows 10, I probably didn’t need it that badly–or forgot it even existed.
If you know you’ve installed some obscure programs that you don’t need that often, but you’d rather not say goodbye to them forever, that’s fine. It’s easy to generate a list of everything you’ve previously put on your PC. Pull up Powershell by clicking on the Start button and typing that in, and then copy and paste this into the prompt:
You’ll want to replace the ***** with a location for the text file, like:c:\Users\David\Desktop\Stuff.txt
You can also export a list of your installed applications via the Command Prompt. Pull that up, similar to how you loaded Powershell, and type in “wmic” and hit Enter. Then, enter this string:
output:C:\Users\Davem\Desktop\InstalledProgramsWMIC.txt product get name,version
Obviously, you’ll want to replace my location with yours. You’ll get a prompt that you messed this up if you copy and paste that line of code (unless you happen to also use “davem” as your folder name).
Back up your stuff
I’m not you, so I can’t give you precise instructions for what you do need to save on your system before reinstalling Windows 10. If you’re nervous about any kind of data loss, you could go the hardcore route and clone (or make an image of) your primary drive before you delete anything. You can then take all the time you need to analyze the contents of your old drive and copy over everything you want to preserve before you delete that clone or image.
Most people probably don’t need to go to those lengths, however. When I have to reinstall Windows 10, I usually copy the entire contents of my system’s User folder (normally found in C:\Users\) to a separate drive. That usually takes care of everything I care about, although I’ll do a quick run through any major folders on C:\ to make sure I haven’t accidentally stored data somewhere else, like one of my virtual machine’s hard drives or something.
If you don’t have a spare drive, even a portable one, I’d really recommend investing in something right now. Whether you buy another hard drive, an SSD, a portable drive, or a NAS box, it will be useful for instances like these and you’ll have another place to store backups of your data–assuming, of course, that you’re already sending it to the cloud via whatever service you prefer. You can never have too many backups. Or, at least, that’s what you’ll be thinking when your single backup solution fails.
If you only have a single hard drive, but it’s a biggie, you could also cheap out and partition part of it to hold a clone or image of your primary partition’s contents. It’s an inelegant solution, but it works.
Deauthorize your apps
In case you have a few apps that you have to authorize and can only use on a limited number of systems–CalMAN calibration software comes to mind, as does Office 365 and, of course, iTunes–you’ll want to make sure you deauthorize these before you wipe your system and reinstall Windows 10. (You don’t actually need to do this in advance for Office 365, I just wanted to mention it as an example of authorizations and use limits.)
BY
Comments