New Laptop

Spending nearly 10 years working with computers, I had formatted my hard drive like a zillion times and every time i faced new challenges. Now days, things are pretty simple, just run the back-up and everything is all set. Sounds great, but still. Managing your stuff, your softwares is a big problem. So, I came up with few standards and would like to share with you. Lets start with a brand new laptop (or a restored machine).

1. Remove all the unwanted stuff - like all the sharewares that are gonna expire in 30 days. (Microsoft works, MS office student edition, Adobe Premiere, Napster and other such softwares).

2. Partition your Hard Drive - Windows Vista has this new feature where you can partition your hard drive without formatting. Go to Run->type diskmgmt.msc. You can see all your drives and partitions(if any). There is an EISA Configuration partition without any drive letter. Thats the partition holding your OS setup, and restore information. The other drive (C:) should be partitioned. Right click on the drive -> Shrink Volume -> Enter the amount of space to shrink -> Shrink. The new partition needs to be formatted. For standard, give a name to this new partition (eg A_Media, where 'A' can be the first character of your name). You can do more then one partition depending on your Disk space and your needs.

3. Update your antivirus definitions.

4. Download and install Mozilla firefox or Google Chrome. IE is damn too slow.

5. Download any office application. Open office is free to use bu you might face some compatibility issues opening the MS offices files. You can download the open office from here. 

6. Download few Utilities - 

- Winzip (Compression utility)

- Winrar (Compression utility, better then winzip)

- Flashget (a great Download manager)

- VLC media player

- Winamp (to play music)

- iTunes (i guess everyone has iPod these days)

- Instant Messengers (gTalk, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Skype)

- AVG Antivirus

You can visit www.download.com to get these utilities. In case I missed something, let me know.

If you want to save, then you must create a Folder (Installables-> New PC) and save all of them in this folder. 

7. Create a Restore point so that next time you have to format your machine you can restore from this point. This will save you a lot of time.

Now some tips about folder structure

1. Never store anything on your C: drive. In case of any virus or trojan, or you might not be able to boot up your system, then documents in c: drive will be lost.

2. In your second partition, create folders like - Movies, Games, Songs, Personal, txt files, Study, Downloads.

You can set your default download location to this 'Downloads' folder in IE, Firefox, chrome and flashget.

3. For java developers, Download Eclipse and unzip it in c: drive directly. Download Tomcat / JBoss and they should also be installed under c: itself.

Create a folder 'dev' in your second partition. This will be your workspace for eclipse.