Preparing for Disaster or Recovery

Spending some time at my parent’s house this evening. It’s been good to relax with my brothers all in town celebrating Mother’s Day and having dinner together. Normally I’m over here for computer support. Today while I was here I’m following up on an issue from last time.

Dad’s got some weird stuff going on with his computer. Odd, random shut-downs, no-Internet connections will work, and it won’t recognize USB drives anymore. It’s been getting slower and slower, so I’m suggesting a complete wipe of the hard drive and refresh of the system to factory specs. This may seem extreme, but after recently doing this for my own laptop after 3 years of use, I was impressed with how snappy things perked up.

The question then becomes for my dad to review his system and then catalog what applications he really needs and uses on the desktop. I suggested for him to review the programs that are installed and listed in the Add/Remove programs. The next step is to review what programs are listed in the Start > Programs menu.

After making a list of the applications he uses and needs to have reinstalled, he needs to find all the program installation discs for those applications. This is a helpful task to undergo whether or not you’re preparing for disaster or a scheduled recovery and reboot.