Ongoing Wiping hard drive (1 Viewer)

[SmokeWatcher]

Well I'm thinking about wiping my hard drive and reloading the software on my dedicated HTPC, since I'll be adding some new hardware soon. I'm ghosting it before starting...just in case! I plan to upgrade my current video card to a GeForce FX 5950, add a dual tuner card to compliment the existing PVR 150 card, and also try to get the on-board sound to work again (to free up another slot). I'm running BeyondTV with MediaPortal (which could also use an upgrade to the latest version). Right now I have Windows set to auto-install critical updates...and I haven't had any issues so far.

My question is should I continue with the auto-updates, or stop at SP2? My thoughts are M$ will force-download any patch it want anyways...but I don't want to over-burden my HTPC with more "gunk" either.

I appeal to all you HTPC gurus out there...

 

[level20peon]

Hello SmokeWatcher,

Windows updates will most probably not have any effect on your performance at all (except during their installation of course). Benchmarks showed that upcoming SP3 will even boost performance.
Whatsoever... Windows updates contain important bugfixes and security fixes you should install anyway for stability and protection.

So they are rather beneficial than troubling.

There are things you could do to enhance performance other than disabling Windows updates anyway (ie disabling indexing service or disable system restore)... but don't do this if you have no idea what you are doing


-level20peon

 

[SmokeWatcher]

There are things you could do to enhance performance other than disabling Windows updates anyway (ie disabling indexing service or disable system restore)... but don't do this if you have no idea what you are doing


-level20peon

Already done. I've actually decided to leave the hard drive intact when I add my other equipment. There are too many little things I've added that I would have to re-install and set up, and I don't want that kind of trouble right now. Things like firewire channel switching for the STB, LCD display settings, etc. I ghost the OS already every few months. I'll save the windows purge for when I really need to.