Hello,

At my office we have an old HP computer --- P4 2,8 ghz , 1 gb ram, 80 gb HD.

the hard drive is too cluttered and I have ordered a 160gb perpendicular recording secondary drive.

My question: What is the best way to do a system restore and get SP3. (System restore will return it to a state with no service packs at all).

I've read about slip streaming a xp disk but this is from a recovery partition. I plan on plugging in the secondary drive, moving all files from HD1 to HD2 worth keeping and running the system recovery.

Do I have to do the service packs in order? Can I just download a stand alone package for sp3 and be done? Should I just do windows update and restart the computer 1,000 times while it goes through all the updates?

Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

ps. The pc is just for MS office and internet use, I do not want or plan on updating other components.

Here is the download for SP3. I have installed this successfully on a few computers of mine. Beware, some systems will crash with the SP3 installation.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] laylang=en

The easiest way is to use a program like Acronis True Image. It has a clone tool, to do exactly what you want to do.

Thanks for the replies:

@ Badge, Thanks for the link. I'm running SP3 on it now and I hope it won't have any problems. I'll download the file and run it before I do a windows update.

@ DXRick, The reason i'm doing this is to correct the registry --- well clean it up. it has had a ton of programs installed and uninstalled. Also, I want to keep only the core components on the primary drive. Wouldn't a "complete" backup take with it the bad stuff? The point of doing this is to have that "fresh" install feeling. Plus it keeps me from buying a separate program. And I have disks for all important programs.

If you could 'clean up' your current installation, DXRICK is right, Acronis True Image has a one button 'clone' backup feature to external drive. It's about the easiest 'complete system' back up solution out there.

I'm a computer tinkerer ---- so after about every year I usually do a reinstall. I think nothing runs quite as good as a fresh install. (this, on my own pc)

But that's why i asked the forum. I've already done some registry repair programs and although they said they improved everything, there is a ~ 5 second delay when opening files or programs.

My thought is that the my documents program has over 10,000 files < 1mb each. Well, probably 1,000 4 Mb pics. Everything is in "my doc's" folder so moving files won't be bad. It's not like i have to search to back up hidden files. So i'm thinking the drive is too cluttered and this is making the "seek" time longer.

Both are ATA 100 drives. Would it be worth it to clone the recovery partition to the new drive since it has 8mb cache? I'm not sure what the old one has but it is 5 years old. Would I run into problems doing this?

I want to say thanks for the replies. I'm not trying to knock any of the suggestions --- just trying to figure out the best way to go about this.

You can reinstall Windows and then SP3. Then run Windows Update. Then install your security software and run its live updates. Then do the apps.

The hard part is finding and backing up all data files not in My Documents, like the Outlook data files.

Awesome, our office uses web based mail but a family member does have an outlook account that I totally forgot about. Thanks for the head-up DXRick.

I guess i'm going to try this on tuesday when the drive comes in. Thanks to both of you for the pointers. If anybody has any other suggestions or files that ought to be backed up that are not in "my doc" please let me know... if not i'll post the ones I get yelled at for losing to help others.