Re: OT: Query on mirroring for Paul Breeze et al.

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Jordan wrote:
≪being able to rapidly restore your OS and installed app.s as well.
Absent that, you are faced with a horrendous, frustrating, and
time-consuming task. ≫

True. BUT the fact is that (at least with Win 9x) you HAVE TO do a
complete reinstall every two or three years. The wretched system gets so
bloated with leftover registry entries and supposedly "uninstalled"
software and hardware drivers, and heaven only knows what else, that it
gets more and more unstable, and finally has to be wiped clean and
reinstalled, with all patches and all applications. I believe that there
are ways to automate some of this, by writing batch files that would, for
example, only install those parts you want (e.g., NO OUTLOOK), and one of
these days I'll try and winkle that information out of the knowledge base
(it's one of those things M$ thinks only SysAdmins need to know). But
that's only Windows. AFAIK, there's no way to automate installing, say,
WordIMperfect (with its hundreds of fonts, some of which are lovely and
some of which are hideous, and the "groupings" are no help).

One way of keeping track of downloaded patches, drivers, shareware apps,
etc: put all such downloads on a separate partition (or at least a
separate directory) of your hard drive before installing (maybe Windows
Update won't let you do that; one reason I never use it) and periodically
backup to CD or DVD R.

Harry will no doubt accuse me of paranoia, but surely the reason you
cannot "rapidly restore your OS and installed app.s" is MicroSquelch's
terror that someone might clone the system and run it on several
machines? I'll bet Very Big Companies with multimillion $$ site licenses
get tools that we poor slobs don't.

Patricia