How-To: Make Fresh Installs Less Painful | nedge2k.com | Image, Backup, Which, Install, Cab

Recovery DVDs? Backup partitions? Nah, those are for pussies ;) In my experience, there's an easy 3-step plan to making a fresh install hassle free:

Backup

Acronis True Image is the name of the game here. Use this app to create a full image of your drive(s) and put it somewhere safe, you'll need them later ;) You might also like to take a look a some apps to backup settings and information from your most used programs, such as MozBackup (for Firefox) and Outlook Backup (for MS Outlook).

Install

My weapon of choice for making installs easier is Nlite . Nlite is an awesome tool which lets you hack XP/MCE/2003 to death. With it you can integrate apps, hotfixes, drivers, service packs, patches and change all those important settings (show all files, delete pagefile on reboot, hide language bar, skip the "tour" at first boot etc. etc.) to give you a fully unattended installation. It'll even let you integrate your serial number so you never have to enter it again! Then you can create a bootable ISO which you then burn to disc and install! The Nlite forums contain a huge ammount of regularly updated addons for you to integrate into your OS in .CAB form. They even had a .CAB of Activesync! Don't be put off by it's complexity, it's very easy to use and hovering over the items usually gives you a description of what it does. Whatever you do, don't use the crappy OEM disc that came with your PC/Laptop. They are usually full of crap like Norton Antivirus which slow your system right down. Get yourself a fresh, untouched copy and start with that ;)

Restore

Once you've installed, it's time to restore and that's where Acronis True Image comes back into play. Remember that image you made earlier? Well, you can now mount that image as a drive and copy all your personal files back off it it! I also like to copy the program files folders of certain apps which have alot of custom settings (mIRC for example). 

In a couple of hours you'll have everything exactly how you left it, only fresher, faster and minus the crap ;)