I do not have the time or patience to do that, especially if I can
clean up my existing install.
Ok, just thought it worth mentioning as many people find it
prudent to do- for similar reasons as those you are now
addressing.
If the OS had not mistakenly loaded the wrong disk driver I would have
never even thought about it. It's more than just a grain of sand.
This once, yes, but the general concept of deleting all this
stuff is essentially picking off tiny bits from the whole
with no expectation it would make a difference except for
specific problematic devices- which was more-or-less my
point all along, to not change what doesn't require a
change.
But I get the point - if I can get rid of the obvious stuff then I
have accomplished my task. I guess I will have to print a screenshot
of before and after View Hidden to tell which are active and which are
not.
Still not so sure you "need" to get rid of any of that.
Another way to approach this is to look in the registry at
the [ENUM] keys, deleting that hardware which is no longer
in the system.
I run three different Registry cleaners plus the old RegClean from MS.
Ok, but I've observed that even after a clean install of the
OS, and one-time install of apps but NO uninstalls, these
cleaners still seem to want to "do" something, that
something being a cause for concern as there shouldn't be
anything to "clean" yet. I find them often more trouble
than they're worth, but admittedly I don't run 8 yr old
NT4-upgraded boxes so at this point you are the expert on
that scenario.
I have removed just about everything from the old systems.
I would be surprised if there isn't at least a few hundred
MB of stuff left on the drive, but again I'm not doing this
and dont' have the box to look at.
That is good but with the files defragmented, they can still
be scattered around on the drive as whole files, moreso
after waves of software installation/uninstallation, then
it's a given that the upgraded OS files didn't get put on
the front of the drive since the NT4 files were there at the
time.
That may be true if I have a lot of old legacy stuff on disk. But I
ran the uninstaller for everything and it presumably cleans most of
that crap off.
Out of curiosity, what is the total size of your Winnt
folder? I don't remember the exact size right after a clean
install but believe it's well under 800MB.
I simply have too much on here to give that any thought - for now
anyway. It is my understanding that when I migrate to XP Pro that the
business of migration is much different from the old In-Place Ungrade.
In the case of the IPU I cloned the old disk and used Win2K
installation to convert that disk to the new environment. I could see
it deleting old system files and replacing, so presumably there is no
leaness issue there.
While that sounds good in principle, in practice many do
still find it beneficial to do the clean install, that it
does end up leaner. You'd have to do that yourself to know
wha the total difference is, if you're not wanting to then
forget I mentioned it as the proper operation is all that
counts in the end- if you're happy with it.
However, as I understand it with XP Pro, I load the new OS onto the
new HD and use XP to copy only those files that are needed for the new
environment. Presumably all the old crap will not get copied. I don't
know if this is equivalent to a fresh rebuild or not. Maybe you all
can comment.
Copy only those files "needed for the new environment"?
No I think it's a complete install plus all the extra
garbage left over, expect that the result will be a few
hundred (if not a gigabyte or more by now) of wasted space
due to leftover files... then again I have no idea how much
other software you have or haven't installed and uinstalled
during the history of the system so I could be wildly off in
that guesstimation.
Since you're making backups you can test all this for
yourself, with no obligation to keep the results if they're
unsatisfactory.
