New T61 arrived today, what to do with default HD stuff?

[devildog2067]

After 7 weeks, my T61p finally arrived! I'm very excited, but I'm already (after 2 hours) fed up with all the crap that came with the OS bundled on the machine.

The plan was always to use Linux or Mac OS X as the main operating system, so honestly I'm not that worried about it.

My question--I paid for a nice 100GB 7200RPM hard drive with WinXp and all the factory stuff on it.

Can I make an image of this drive, including the recovery partition, and put it somewhere? Then wipe the drive? In such a way that if I ever want to, I can restore this machine to out-of-the-box state?

Otherwise I'm just going to pull this drive and it'll sit in a drawer till I sell this machine.

Thanks.

[mgo]

After 7 weeks, my T61p finally arrived! I'm very excited, but I'm already (after 2 hours) fed up with all the crap that came with the OS bundled on the machine.
Can I make an image of this drive, including the recovery partition, and put it somewhere? Then wipe the drive? In such a way that if I ever want to, I can restore this machine to out-of-the-box state?

Otherwise I'm just going to pull this drive and it'll sit in a drawer till I sell this machine.

Thanks.

If you have another drive, then pulling the existing drive would be a good idea. That would be a major time and trouble saver at sales times.

Before doing that, maybe you could create the recovery CD set as a emergency backup.

The unwanted programs and features that you dislike can be uninstalled without much trouble in Control Panel Add/Remove.

Then just do a defrag and you ought to be running a bit faster.

There are other speed tweaks in the Performance menu that will perk the operating system up a lot, also.

[ZaZ]

Also make a copy of the SWTools folder which contains all the software and drivers installed on your machine.

Rescue and recovery allows you to do essentially a clean install, putting on only the things you want.

[pae77]

All you need to do is to make a set of recovery disks (DVDs and/or CDs). There is an option for this on the start menu in the Thinkvantage group of programs. Once you have the recovery disks, you can use them to restore a hard drive to the initial condition the machine was in when it came from the factory any time you want.