Installing windows 7 from usb on new build

[rab2011]

Hello

just ordered components and gonna build my 1st pc for 6 years but what i wanna know is when i install windows 7 1st time onto the sata hard drive is it straight forward or or will i have to format the hard drive etc 1st.

hope this is clear

thanks

 

[mcnumpty23]

windows should format it during setup

there is an option to format it in windows 7 setup anyway if for some reason it doesnt do it automatically

 

[rab2011]

cheers and thanks for the reply i wasnt sure if there was or not but thats what i was thinking

 

[mcnumpty23]

from memory it gets to the part where it lists the hard drives and underneath the drives its got advanced drive options or something similar--you can delete and format in there

 

[rab2011]

thanks remember that option from installing windows 7 on my laptop but that hard drive had already been formatted and wasnt sure if it would be dif with a brand new raw hard drive

 

[bucknutty]

MS did a great job with the windows 7 installer. You can take a raw hard drive and the installer will by default create one large partion and format it as NTFS for you.

It will also create a 100mb system partion. This is normal.

 

[rab2011]

sound thanks for the help everyone

 

[danraies]

One other thing to keep in mind:

I can't remember the exact process, but there should be an option to either "full format" or "quick format." If you're using an HDD you should choose full format on a brand new drive and then you can quick format after that. With an SSD you should never full format.

 

[rab2011]

cheers would have chose the full format regardless dont have an ssd and not really sure if they are worth the money for the amount of storage u get either

 

[mcnumpty23]

ssd is expensive for the amount of storage you get but the speed increase is what you are paying for--the mechanical hard drive is the slowest part in your pc

no other upgrade i have done--even going from a 2ghz cpu to a 4ghz cpu has had such a positive effect

for example on my mechanical drive firefox takes 3 to 4 seconds to open--in the same system its immediate

photoshop cs5 with a load of plugins is extremely slow to load on a mechanical drive but hugely faster on the ssd and games load far faster

just got a mushkin 120gb ssd for £131 on special offer and even though thats the cost of say a 3 terabyte mechanical drive i wouldnt swap it for 4 mechanical drives in raid

so definately ask some one to get you a good make ssd for xmas

 

[danraies]

SSDs are worth the money if you have the money, for sure. Like mcnumpty23 mentions, there's no other hardware upgrade that gives you the same performance upgrade. It doesn't matter how fast your cpu is - if you're opening an application, the speed will be prohibited by a spinning drive.

@rab2011 he would not have to full format regardless. You can do a "quick format" that wipes the data or a "full format" that wipes the data and does chdisk. You want to do a full format on a brand new drive to make sure it doesn't have any bad sectors. SSDs don't need full formated and a full format is bad for an SSD.