Restoring Factory Settings

Yesterday, while shopping around in Carrefour, yeah I know I said I would never go there again, but well it’s right next door and I’ve sort of figured out the best times to go. Anyway, while I was shopping around and checking out the tech stuff, I came across the shelf with the CD-Rs and stuff, or “CDs Vierges” (Virgin CDs) as they call them in French.

Seeing these piles of CD-Rs reminded me of my long planned, yet never done, format of my laptop. I mean, I’ve had this laptop for 4 years now, and it’s never been formatted. That’s abnormal, especially from an IT guy like me.
A load of crap is lying around on it’s hard disk everywhere, the Windows XP installation is barely breathing, and day after day it’s getting more and more impossible to work with.

So, I picked up a pack of 10 CDs, which I thought added to the CDs I have at home would be enough to back everything up, and as soon as I got home, started backing up every bit of information I need onto these CDs.

I backed up my photos, which needed 5 CDs on their own, my documents, my work files, my downloads, my rubbish and whatever else.

I finished backing everything up last night at midnight, and when I woke up this morning, I popped in the Recovery CD and chose the restore to factory settings option. After a bunch of warnings that all my data will be going to neverland, the laptop was restored to it’s orginal state, and what a pleasure that was.

I was thinking of throwing in a Linux distro next to Windows, but well, that’ll have to wait; Windows XP Home Edition should do for now.

I’m aiming to keep this a light installation with only the ultra necessary programs. I hope my curious testing side doesn’t take over again making a mess out of it all over again.

I found out that in the heat of the moment, I forgot to backup my email data, so I’ve lost every email that was downloaded to my hard disk through outlook express or thunderbird during the last 4 years, but well, not such a big deal, they’re mostly old emails.
I also lost all my fonts, which sucks, especially that it’ll be hard to find some good Arabic fonts all over again.

Other than that, all is fine, and here I am blogging from a faster, lighter installation.

Published by

Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

8 thoughts on “Restoring Factory Settings”

  1. Hi,
    I’m sorry but I’ m going to put an off topic comment : I actually read your article on global voice online ” echos from tunisian blogosph

  2. Hi,
    I’m sorry but I’ m going to put an off topic comment : I actually read your article on global voice online ” echos from tunisian blogosph

  3. Hi Princess, thanks for your comment. I’ll make sure I’ll put that in my next post.

    The post that was published today on Global Voices is actually the one I wrote for last week, that’s why it doesn’t have posts from this past week.

    Anyway, I’ll make sure this gets through in the next Tunisian post.

  6. when I buy my desktop, I used to format & test new programs so often(it was like a drug) that I get tired about all that !
    So now I format my PC only every 6 months,to get rid of hidden undetectable spams or virus,and I move all my data to the second DATA partition.

    During a period I was passionate with collecting arabic fonts 🙂 so I have a collection of them gathered during years,I could send them if you want,or perhaps I will share them in my blog.

Comments are closed.