Installing my laptop after a repair

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr).

What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

Published Thu, Feb 19 2009 12:45 AM by Rick van den Bosch
Filed under: , , ,

Comments

# re: Installing my laptop after a repair

Thursday, February 19, 2009 9:40 AM by Erwyn van der Meer

Get a Windows Home Server! It has an almost perfect full system backup-restore story for situations like this. Makes an automatic daily backup cycle really easy. Only takes about 15-30 minutes a day because it only sends clusters that have changed to the server. You can pick and choose the day to restore to. Just boot from the WHS Restore CD.

I just leave my laptop in sleep mode at night. It automatically wakes up in the middle of the night to back up and then goes back to sleep again. Works fine over wireless.

The hard disk you restore to doesn't even have to be the same size as the original.

You can also inspect and restore individual files from backups by just mounting them as an extra drive. So no need to do a full system restore in case you lost just a few files.

It respects EFS file encryption. These files are also encrypted in the backup and can only be read on systems that have the right EFS certificate.

I could go on and on... ;)

PS: Don't forget Live Mesh ;)

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required) 
Please add 3 and 4 and type the answer here: