Reformat Help

[LennnoX]

I bought my computer just over 2 years ago from Overclockers. I'm looking to re-format my PC just to bring things back up to speed and generally clear out some old crap.

I have a few questions if anyone has the time to help me out.

In terms of doing a fresh install, what is the best way to do this? I was thinking of borrowing an external harddrive to keep the larger items, such as Warcraft, OS and all of my personal files. Is this the best way to do it? Is there any clouds or anything that could support up to ~40gb of personal stuff?

And in terms of reformatting itself, I would have to manually re-install Windows, would this default and be upgraded to Windows 10 without my consent? I'm guessing they probably overhauled this to instantly upgrade? Or do I still have the option to go in and turn this off in terms of automatic updates.

Generally, just wondering what I can expect from this, will there be a noticeable upgrade as my PC is running quite slow, without going in to specifics of my PC, I am looking to upgrade bits and pieces in the future.


Thanks,

LennnoX

 

[Bane]

I have a portable USB hard drive for backing up documents and other directories. Would be faster transferring via USB3 to a hard drive than uploading to a cloud based service if you have a regular ISP service.

If using Windows 8/8.1 you can use a feature in the operating to reset it. That basically clears the installed programs and puts OS back to newly installed state. There's also a refresh feature, but that keeps you programs.

It might be faster to reinstall the OS instead of reset, I can't comment as not done it before. With reset you may have to reinstall drivers, and I think the old programs get stuck in a directory you can manually delete to free up space.

If decide to reinstall from scratch it's faster using a USB memory stick than DVD. You can use a tool called Rufus to create a bootable memory stick from a Windows ISO file, and if you download the most ISO there will be less updates to retrieve once Windows checks for updates.

If you never took the free upgrade to Windows 10 then you won't receive offer to upgrade as it has expired. If you previously upgraded to Windows 10 then you can install Windows 10 straight away without needing to install your previously OS. Then when you go online it will automatically activate.

Rufus
https://rufus.akeo.ie/