wr_schwab

It's not necessarily the Windows install that takes a lot of time.

It's all of the other drivers and programs that you need to reinstall and configure AFTER Windows is installed that can take a lot of time.

For example, after upgrading my Windows 7 computer to Windows 10, so the digital entitlement key would be generated for the system. I did a clean install of Windows 10 on a computer. (Personal preference...From what I understand the Windows 10 upgrade process works very well and doesn't really have any issues. I've had enough things not work correctly in the past when I've upgraded the OS that I just prefer to do a clean install of my OS. It also provides for a good excuse to go through all of my files and get rid of stuff I don't need. )

I think I spent 8 hours on the project. The actual install of Windows took maybe a half hour, which isn't too bad.

The rest of the time was doing things like installing updated drivers for hardware (namely video card and a few other devices that the drivers are not included as part of Windows 10), reinstalling all of the software (Office, games, any number of other programs), tweaking them so they had my personal settings.

I made a disk image of the system once it was done. If something borks my system, I can always go back to this point in time.

Restoring the disk image will take about the same amount of time as a clean install of Windows did. Even if I have to reinstall a couple of programs and do some Windows updates I'm still ahead of the game in terms of time spent on the project.

That said, disk imaging is the best solution FOR ME and the amount of software I have to quickly restore to a specific point in time.

Other people may not have the same amount of programs or weird hardware I have that they need to reinstall and as such one of the other options presented in this thread may be a better solution.

nkedel

Just depends on the particular programs you use, I guess. A lot of my professional ones go through enough updates that just not using a spare machine for a couple of months and I might as well be doing a clean reinstall for all the updates it needs.

Really depends on the particular software and hardware you're running. IME most of the time it works really well; I've run it on enough machines to hit ones where it was either totally unusable or very flakey but it's much less common.

Ouch.

At 8 hours, yeah, I can see that -- although the Windows updates can themselves be lengthy [although without an updated ISO you might get those anyway; ditto with Office without an updated installer]

On all both my two main laptops and my spare laptop, they've gotten pretty much all the hardware off Windows update automatically (the newest one requires manually loading either a wireless or wired network driver to get to Windows update) which saves a lot of time compared to Windows 7 and older where there were a lot of manual driver updates and a specific order they needed to go in (often with a reboot in between.)

I suspect most don't; in my case, I don't think I'm that far off, but the upgrade rate makes it less than worth it. Especially with tools that claim to auto-update but then the update message sends me back to the web site to download the full installer...