Owain wrote:
Stuart Noble wrote:

Interested to know what people think about recovery disks. I recently
sorted out a friend's Dixons PC, which was infected with all manner of
nasties. Put My Documents on to a cdrw, booted from the Dixons
recovery CD and the whole thing was running sweetly within the hour.
Doing that periodically seems like a simple maintenance schedule for
any level of user.
So, how easy would it be to create a bootable CD for a home made
machine? I rather fancy a bit of colonic irrigation


Very easy under Linux, not sure about MSWindows. The problems with
Windows recovery disks are that they often format the whole hard disk,
install lots of things the manufacturers include but the user doesn't
need, and that Windows doesn't keep user files and settings in one
coherent easily-restored place.

My Documents doesn't usually hold address book or mailbox files, custom
spelling dictionaries etc.

Owain


I suppose docs and settings might be a better bet in XP but possibly a
lot of the garbage you're trying to get rid of would be there too.