Just finished a major overhaul of my PC used at home. Malware and program malfunctions had seriously degraded performance and security over time.
It came down to a fresh install of the OS in the end, and all problems were cleared. My trading software now works routinely at greased lightning speed, which is fast enough for most market circumstances and conditions.
I also decided to separate my data, documents, work files, and other stuff from my OS. It shows you how to do this here, (besides many other sites).
techsupportalert.com
I also decided to dual boot two OS, as I have an old copy of Win 2k professional sitting around, and it's clear to me I need a back system in place if things go wrong, and things obviously do go wrong at times.
I started by dividing my Hard Disk into four partitions. I use Partition Manager 8.5, but there a plenty of programs to help you do this, and of course you can modify your partitions straight from the administrative tool set of your OS. It's just that I find Partition Manager easy to use if I need to modify anything, which I needed to do on several occasions.
Originally I just plonked an image of my OS onto a partition, and decided to arrange a duel boot with another OS (I am using XP Home Edition and Win 2K Professional). Using the facilities of Partition Manager 8.5 I did get a duel boot to work, but you cannot get around they fact that both systems are really on the "C:\" drive. Just that the "C:" and "D:" drives get swapped around every time to load up an OS. I could see this leading to problems with a common but separate partition used for documents and data, so I elected for the Microsoft recommended practice of reloading a fresh version of each OS on separate partitions, loading the older Win 2K first. I am sure real I.T professionals can change the reference of all files in an OS over to a new drive at the drop of a hat, but it would be an advanced task, to say the least, for me.
Both installation disks are really ancient, and they do not recognise partitions above 132GB unless service packs are installed. The motherboard would not work properly until I installed several service packs either, so I used my net book and a USB stick to download independent service packs for each OS.
i.e I could not use this site for Win 2k for example.
microsoft.com
Had to use this one.
microsoft.com
There ya go, so now I'm an I.T professional -g-
It's amazing how fast you can download stuff these days. The upgrades downloaded in a flash. I reloaded my many software programs. Some of the programs are on both XP and Win2k, but I divided up the rest which I think is a good idea. Partition Manager 8.5 is on the older Win2k for example, and of course I have a recovery disk too which loads the program without an OS. Now I have Win2k(sp4) and XP(sp3) running on separate partitions, a common partition for data and documents, and a spare (big) partition for downloads and images. The whole lot is backed up with off site image copies on external Hard Drives.
I'm ready to play with Win 7 now, but I think a new PC (I do actually need an additional PC) with quad processors and 64 bit processing I think. |
