Support is ending for office 2003, will service packs still be available ?

vlad_the_impaler

It slows down mainly becuase of all of the patches and updates that get added on. Although it will feel faster upon reinstall, by the time you have added all the Service Packs and updates in again, there won't be much difference. You are wasting your time doing this every 6 months. If you like speed, spend £50 on an SSD - you won't regret it, and you will have all the speed you could hope for.

ARTHUR

well it also slows down due to the registry getting fragmented through adding and removing programs, but I never thought of replacing my HDD with a digital SSD, that would be faster and less likely to crash/break down I suppose

Uxb

If you are still using XP, this doesn't really like SSD's....it was never designed with them in mind as they didn't exist then.
OS's need to operate SSD in a different way to standard hard disks as lots of unnecessary read/write cycles degrade SSD's.
In particular there is no TRIM function built into XP like there is on Win 7.

There is some evidence that SSD's may becoming more reliable than hard drives however when they fail they fail totally and instantly - there is no warning phase of funny sounds and slow response/errors occurring.

spannerzone

Arthur if you reformat every 6 months you need to investigate the joys of imaging a hard drive. Using free or low cost software you clone your freshly installed (new) installation of Windows. This makes an exact copy (image) of that installation, if you need to reload Windows to 'as new' then you boot up the recocery software, load the image you created (from a second hard drive usually) and in about 15 mins you have a PC that has Windows reloaded. No 4 hours of waiting while it reformats, reloads, updates etc.

Once you do this you will want to hit yourself with a frying pan for not finding out about this sooner. You will save days of wasted time reloading Windows!

Free Macrium is worth looking at.

ARTHUR

spannerzone wrote: »

Arthur if you reformat every 6 months you need to investigate the joys of imaging a hard drive. Using free or low cost software you clone your freshly installed (new) installation of Windows. This makes an exact copy (image) of that installation, if you need to reload Windows to 'as new' then you boot up the recocery software, load the image you created (from a second hard drive usually) and in about 15 mins you have a PC that has Windows reloaded. No 4 hours of waiting while it reformats, reloads, updates etc.

Once you do this you will want to hit yourself with a frying pan for not finding out about this sooner. You will save days of wasted time reloading Windows!

Free Macrium is worth looking at.

this sounds like the sort of thing that I need to find out more about, the next time I format my hard disk and reinstall windows 7 and MS Office and all the service packs and security updates for windows 7 and office then I could make an image to save me days of work in the future, but can you do it from a dvd disk instead of a second HHD??
thanks for the info

st999

can you do it from a dvd disk instead of a second HHD?

Only if your image is less than 4.37 GB, which will be extremely unlikely.

Although you could use more than one DVD.