Need advice before format c:

[videocheez]

After about six months of fooling around a vcdhelp.com I have installed som many programs that I believe that my comps performance has been compromised. On Saturday I plan to spend some time reformatting my drive and reinstalling the recovery disk. I would like some suggestions about the best way to make this as painless as possible.
Next time around I want to install the minimum amount of codecs and set this comp up as an encoding machine. Should I disconnect all of the peripherials such as routers, surround sond speakers, extra memory, remote hardrive, web cam etc. prior to rebooting. Can I reintall my same version of kazaa lite or will i have to try a newer version? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

VC

[Doggiedaddy]

Boot to windows xp pro/2000 delete all partitions. Create new partition/partitions and install OS. Now put only the programs you want. There is nothing better than a clean install machine, other than writing 0000 to HD.
When you get it just where it hums along great do an entire system B/U [preferable to an external HD] and a Automated System Recovery disk/floppy with the OS on board back up utility. If problems arise insert floppy and CD boot to floppy and recovery back to previous state, at least where you backed up too last time. Great Insurance, I've trashed a half dozen HD and was up and running in hours not days!!

Dd

[videocheez]

My hard drives are configured for RAID, can I make partitions? Also I'm running XP home. My recovery disk is going to set up the comp like it did when I bought it at BestBuy last August, I think. Do you suggestions still apply?

Thanks in advance,

VC

[q1aqza]

I would also recommend using Norton Ghost to make an image of your clean new build. Save it off to another partition on your hard drive or even better crate an additional back up onto DVD (or spanned CDs).

I always (without fail) take a Norton Ghost image before I install any new or trial software or codec so I know I have always got a clean working build to fall back on. It is so quick to create an image and even quicker to restore. Best piece of software I have actually paid for !!

A lesson learned: A short while back I made a mistake and accidentally deleted an image not long after I installed the MainConcept DV codec and it screwed my Adobe Premiere up and I had no image to fall back on - anyway lesson learnt is that I also back up my images to DVD - incase I get trigger happy with emptying the recycle bin.

[rallynavvie]

I'll be doing this same thing this weekend, except I'm doing it so that I can partition the primary drive to put RedHat 9 on it. FYI don't trust the automated system restore utility that Windoze has, it never seems to work properly when you need it to. Ghost is probably the best method for backups.

I didn't know you could RAID the boot drive? If your RAID array consists of additional hard drives they should be OK since most RAID controllers have onboard BIOS that remembers your settings. Are you running RAID 0 or 1? If you're running RAID 0 it really wouldn't hurt to back up the data on there. I remember how much time I spent dealing with "missing stripes"

[videocheez]

Thanks for the advice guys. I will definetly will get ghost. Now that I have successfully started off all fresh again. What codecs do you think that I should install? Last time i did the nimo packs and I read everywhere that this was a bad idea. any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

VC

[rallynavvie]

I think if you're running TMPGEnc you'll want to buy Cyberlink PowerDVD so you can use its MPEG2 codec to encode from VOBs or MPEG2 files. Beyond that the latest DivX seems less buggy, a good DV AVI codec like Canopus, probably Huffyuv, and the latest Quicktime codecs supporting MPEG4. The default WinXP ones round out the rest. I can't tell if it's the VDOwave or the Vivoactive video codec from the Nemo pack that hurts the good ones or which one it is. Probably a combination of the two and then some.

Does anyone have a better MPEG2 codec that works with TMPGEnc? For some reason it always crashes on my new PC even though I have a PAID version of PowerDVD 4. It only works some of the time whereas the OEM version that came installed on my old Dell worked every time with TMPGEnc without problems.