A long time ago, in a place far away ...

As we were planning some travel, I thought it would be nice to have a laptop that could go along. This was when Win95 was the best Windows available.

I purchased a new laptop, took it home and started setup. Starting with the OS and Office programs already in place on the machine, it took me 23 hours to adjust settings in the Office programs to my personal preferences, and copy data files I wanted from my desktop machine. I still have the log files to show what all had to be done, and the letter I sent to the manufacturer, so this isn't just a "rememberance."

Unfortunately, one old program that I added near the end of this exercise resulted in a crash/lockup and the error messages indicated that (per the laptop builder) my best option was to insert the recovery CD. When I did so, the CD took over, disabled keyboard and mouse input, reformatted the drive and reinstalled everything just like what I had started with.

The reinstallation to "raw" state took approximately 2 hours.

A telephone call to the service people at the manufacturer's number revealed that this was the intended function of the recovery disk. They agreed that the process could not be interrupted if the disk was used.

By 3:00 PM the following day, I was back home with a different laptop, for which I had verified - in the store - that the recovery disk was usable somewhat like an original OS installation CD. Although it took about the same 20+ hours to tweak the setup on all the office programs and get all my data files transferred, I don't believe I ever needed the recovery disk for the replacement laptop except for a couple of times when a different driver was needed for a plugin module. That laptop still runs (but doesn't have the resources to put a later Win version on it).

Win95 was pretty crude compared to later versions. It's also worth noting that at that time I didn't need even a dial-up web connection, and did not require configuring the laptop for LAN hookup.

For current machines, a reformat of an 80 GB hard drive (or partition) typically takes an hour or more, if you do a full format. A full format of a 160 GB HD, a good size for general use now, can run around 3+ hours. (Multiply times by at least 2.5 for laptop HDs due to their slower access times, but allow for smaller drives common in laptops.)

An installation of WinXP to a desktop machine from the shrink-wrap package carries a suggestion that one allot at least 3 hours for the setup. This does not include fully setting up any LAN and/or web connections, or for setting preferences to get to useful layouts and functions instead of the "idiots only" Windows defaults. Add at least 3 to 5 hours for setup after installation.

Installation of Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, and perhaps another one or two of the Office Suite may require from one to three or four separate CDs. Each CD can take an hour or more for installation and basic setup.

If you're working from an early issue WinXP CD, you will need up to 80 hours "connect time" for updates from the web site, to get current with patches, although you can set it up to do the download and installation in about an hour, and let the updates install as they arrive.

Probably the majority of people get their Windows and Office as OEM versions preinstalled on the hard drive before the computer arrives. This usually reduces a complete reinstallation of what came with th emachine to two CDs¹, and a very few makers actually provide a "mirror installation²" on the CDs which can significantly reduce the reinstall time; but it's still likely to run at least a couple of hours.

¹ One maker I've encountered puts everything on a DVD. Since the "DVD part" of a multi-function optical drive is arguably the most failure-prone device one's likely to have, most failures probably mean installing a new CD/DVD drive before software reinstallation can be attempted (in my experience). Even DVD readers that do a perfectly acceptable playback for movies and music may have bit-error rates unacceptable for large software installation.

² The mirror installation was what the laptop maker above attempted to provide. That maker, unfortunately, failed to provide OS source files to permit any other kind of recovery. Most of the few who do a "mirror" do now provide "installation files" so you can do either a start-over or can access the CAB files needed for normal maintenance.

IFF you have all your data files sequestered somewhere in backups, just copying 80 GB of data files to your "restored" hard drive via either USB-2 or 10/100-BaseT LAN (at true 100 MB/sec or better) probably will take between 1 and 3 hours, depending on the quality of the drives involved on both ends, especially if you elect to verify the file writes. Double the time for anything copied back from CDs and add time for swapping disks, and expect about x4 (with fewer delays for disk swaps) from DVD due to slow seek time on most DVD readers.

Recap:
1. Reformat 80 GB partition - 1 to 3 hours
2. Install WinXP - 2 to 5 hours
3. Configure preferences in WinXP - 1 to 2 hours
4. Reinstall and configure AV program, and firewall - 1 hour if you're good
5. Rebuild/tweak web connections and LAN hookups - 1 hour
6. Reinstall Office programs - 1 to 5 hours
7. Configure preferences in Office programs - 2+ hours
8. Connect and setup auto update for Windows and Office programs 1 hour (actual downloads will take about 80 hours).
9. Reconfigure email connections and setup logins - up to an hour.
10. Reinstall Popup Blocker, AntiSpyware, AntiAdware, etc.

Now if everything went well, I'm ready to:

Re-import active email
Re-import email address books (3)
Reinstall Adobe Acrobat (Distiller/Reader)
Reinstall Fonts not in Windows basic setup
Reinstall Ghostwrite/GhostScript/GhostGum
Reinstall Pagemaker
Reinstall Photoshop (Elements in my case)
Reinstall AutoCad Light
Reinstall 3 or 4 music notation programs
Reinstall FrameMaker (the Demo program I use for reference)
Reinstall DeLorme (Highway Map program)
Reinstall Random House Dictionary
Reinstall Adobe Drivers for !PS functions on 3 printers
Reinstall Windows Drivers for 7 printer configurations
Reinstall Scanner software for two scanners
Reinstall/Download programs/critical updates for 7 media programs (estimated 5 hours for patch downloads, minimum, but not all are immediately essential)
Reinstall 3Com driver files and config utilities
Reinstall Western Digital Hard Drive utiltities
Reinstall SoundBlaster control panel, utilities, and MIDI banks
Reconfigure MIDI instrument inputs
Reinstall digital camera interface programs (2)
Reinstall NVIDIA DVD manager/viewer
Reinstall two CD/DVD burner programs
Reinstall TextBridge OCR program
Reinstall whatever else I'd have to look at my records to recall.
Selectively configure sharing of all of above for other machines on my LAN.
Re-Register and verify configuration for Microsoft Updates after everything is working again.
Copy active data files³ from backup

³ 20 or 30 GB of data files would probably be considered "large" for most people; but I do keep closer to 80 GB of data files on my system HD. Straight across data transfer from my backup HD would take 2 or 3 hours, with some additional time for a few separate "small backups" that are on CDs.

Yeah, I think one might plan on a weekend, if ya didn't want to sleep a lot.

IF YOU CAN do the setup once, and mirror it to a backup drive that isn't connected to your system (except briefly for updates) you can mirror it back (after reformatting your system drive) in perhaps 2 to 5 hours, for a setup comparable to what I've got. If you've got the resources to do this, you could also consider just swapping hard drives (assuming your mirror was made as a bootable one), make the one removed your new backup, and make a new mirror back to it at your leisure (but preferably promptly).

John