Project: Anagenesis - Formatting

Welcome to Project:Anagenesis. This Project created by Technological Control will introduce ways of making your computer easier to use as well as to correct system mistakes and make the pc run faster, smoother and in a more stable way. In other words, the aim is to make our computers 'harder, faster, better, stronger' (using Black-eyed-peas terms)

In this first part (don't ask how many there will be, even I do not know that) we will start backwards by writing about the heavy weapons of computer repair: Formatting and Re-installing Windows.

But first of all let me tell you a small story:

Everyone of us has an old computer. And by old I mean these computers (minimum 5 years old) that usually crash (blue screen of death) and they are slow, unstable, slow and really really slow! My laptop, a Vaio FS215B, 6 year old became slower and slower constantly. Well, at first I tried the light solutions like erasing garbage from hard drives, lighten my startup etc. But soon, the 512 MB of RAM seemed really low and not able to deal with all the activeX and Flash on the Internet (or, so I thought). Skype almost impossible to run as well as flash (not to mention the combined use of these two), a single page on the web took about 3 minutes to open and even witting to this blog was at some times unbearable. One boring day when I gave up almost all hope of finding the money for a new laptop soon (summer vacations ahead you see) I decided to procceed to formatting of the pc.

I have heard all the fuss about formatting, how dificult it is, that everyone is for some reason scared of it and thinks it is some advanced use of informatics that you should possess a degree to handle. Hey guys, get over it, its just a 'hit "next" button 3 times' procedure. Well, perhaps Vaio has made our lives easier by equiping the hard drive with a secret partition with al the format data but I cannot imagine how harder it could be on any other PC. Literally, I ran Vaio restore utility, hit next three times and voila: Format complete. Well, on my saying I kind of cheat a bit because I had already run once more this utility to format the laptop but it was as easy as now even then (how hard can it be).

As for results? Even I could not believe it. Well, even the most optimistic man in the country of fairy tales and unicorns could believe it! The result by undergoing the hard disk clearing and Windows re-install was to get my pc back! Well, it surely is not compared to a contemporary PC but it is way faster than before, no crushes, no unexplained delays, no nothing. A moderate for our present time laptop, reliable enough for a mainstream user. How 'moderate' is a brekthrough? Well, before formatting, the laptop was less than 'really bad'. At least now I can use everyday applications (Skype, MSN) and i can enter websites with flash content (don't know exactly why but before the whole procedure, my laptop hated Flash...)

So, here, the bio-weapon of old-computer-improvement: Formatting. I don't know your opinion about it (I would love to read it) on whether has it worked or not for you but it surely has worked for me.

And don't be crying babies over formatting procedure, you can find guides and walkthroughs all over the internet (...when man is lost, God gave him search engines...)