Connect with us

Tips

Windows XP Fresh Installation Keeping Documents & Program Files Untouched


Advertisement

Windows XP repair installationA system was brought to me last week by my friend with windows xp installed in it. The windows installed was old and pretty much corrupted and asking for fresh new installation. He insisted me to save the user accounts and their documents and also the program files that were taking well over 20 GB or so.

The other partitions on that hard drive didn’t have enough space to create backup for documents and limited space of his hard drive never allows him to store setups for the programs he installs in the system. So I also had to save all the programs installed (in “program files” folder). This leaves no other option except deletion of the folder in which Windows installs its system files (usually ‘WINDOWS’ folder).


The folder “WINDOWS” contains all the system files, information and settings regarding currently installed windows. Including themes, sounds, settings and most important of all – The Registry. Windows Registry holds all the information of the file types, paths and settings of each and every program installed on a hard drive which can be viewed through “Registry Editor”. So backing up complete windows registry is most important step if you want to save the entries and settings of all the programs installed. We’ll talk about this later in few moments.

So, Only deleting this (“WINDOWS”) folder means that you can not only save your user accounts/documents and installed programs (of “Program Files” folder) but can also install Windows from scratch.

This sounds easy but it’s not possible to delete the “WINDOWS” folder directly not even from safe mode or command prompt. This requires bootable setup CD of Windows XP.

But first don’t forget the most important step of all – Registry Backup.

To Create a backup of Windows Registry:
importing/exporting registry backup in windows xp

1. Click Start from the taskbar.
2. Open RUN.
3. Type regedit and press enter.
4. Click File menu of the main Registry editor window, and select “Export” and define the path where you want to save the backup.
(Don’t select the same partition in which windows is currently installed, choose some other).

Exporting will take only a few moments and size of the backup can be anywhere between 30-100 MB or more than this it totally depends upon the number of programs installed.

Now follow these steps to learn how to do fresh windows installation leaving users’ accounts their “Documents and Settings” and programs in “Program Files” folder intact.

1. After creating windows registry backup, Restart your system and Boot from Windows XP setup CD. (Make sure CD is bootable)

2. After all files are loaded you’ll see step by step setup asking you to choose one option on each screen.
Note down and carefully choose these options on each screen.

3. On First screen, press Enter to Continue to proceed with the setup. (Don’t press “R” to repair on this screen)

4. On License Agreement screen, press F8 to Agree and proceed.

5. On third screen setup will search for existing installation of windows. If it founds any you’ll be prompted to either repair the current installation (by pressing ‘R’) or don’t repair and continue (by pressing ‘Esc’ key).

6. Now Press “R” on this screen to repair the current installation of windows.

7. Setup will search and display you the current folder in which windows installation is found (usually “WINDOWS” folder).

This is the second most important step that will only delete the folder in which setup founds the windows installation.

You’ll be given 2 options here:

Esc – to Choose different folder for new installation.
L – to delete the folder in which it found the existing installation.

Press “L” to delete the folder.

8. On Next screen Setup will show you the list of partitions of your hard drive, carefully select the same partition in which previous installation was found.

Select the partition and Press “Enter” to continue.

9. Just press “C” to continue with the setup process on the next screen.

10. Formatting options will be displayed on the very next screen.
Select last option “Leave the current partion” to skip the formatting by pressing “Enter”.

The rest of the setup will be totally automated and setup will copy the files to the hard drive and on the restart proper installation should start.

After Setup finishes the complete installation process. Login to the windows and check the partition where windows was previously installed.
You’ll see all the folders there inclusing same “WINDOWS” folder but this time this folder contains freshly installed windows system files from scratch.

“Documents and Settings”, “Program Files” and any other folder in the root of the directory are all there untouched. Now all you have to do is to restore the registry backup you created before installation to make your programs work same as before.

To restore a backup of Windows Registry:

1. Click Start from the taskbar.
2. Open RUN.
3. Type regedit and press enter.
4. Click File menu from the main Registry editor window, and select “Import” and browse the backup.

After restoration and a system reboot all your programs installed in “Program Files” folder should work fine now with the completely new windows installation.

This repair method saves a lot of time in backing and restoring up the documents if you chose the formatting strategy to install fresh windows.

Hope you found this helpful 🙂

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Comments

Tips

Lost Data From iPhone? Reasons and Steps For Recovery [Infographic]

Lost Data From iPhone

Well, if you have lost data from iPhone, it is highly likely that you may become a victim of this data loss from your iPhone for some reasons which you have not come across as of yet. And since your mobile serves to be the hub of most of your precious data, you would definitely not want to encounter anything like this, right?

Recommended Read: How To Keep Data Safe on Smartphones – Best Security Measures

Data which is a digital form of information stored on your iPhone is always vulnerable to losses. Whether they are the highly important WhatsApp messages, videos, and photos that carry amazing memories, highly sensitive contacts or anything else that is stored in your mobile; you are always at a risk of losing all of it in just one go!

Related Article: How To Recover Deleted Whatsapp Media Files From Phone

Causes for Data Loss from iPhone

There is not one or two but many causes that lead to the lost data from iPhone. To provide you with a better picture, we have divided the causes in an order which accounts the most to the least. So, let’s take a look at the list:

Accidental Deletion

Accidental deletion accounts for around 35% of all the losses that happen with the users of iPhone. While some deletion happens in a haste and other unknowingly; be it any form, it is the cause which tops the list of all the losses!

Water Damage

We are sure that you must have come across this term several times. Unsurprisingly, it is the second leading cause which accounts for 15% of the data loss among the iPhone users that abandon them with their precious data.

Failed iOS Upgrade or Jailbreak

Standing par to par with Water damage, the failed attempt of jailbreaking or up gradation of iOS also leads to the lost data from iPhone and accounts for 15% among the iPhone users.

Restoring to Factory Setting

It accounts for around 10% of the total losses because we most cases forget to back up the data before pressing that button!

Virus Attack

With only accounting for 5% of total losses, the Virus attack is the least leading factor of the losses of data from your iPhone.

You can find further details and stats by looking at the following infographic which contains absolutely everything which you would want to know.

Continue Reading

Guides

How to Make Sure the Article You Have is plagiarism free?

how to check plagiarism free article

The act of copying someone’s text, content or article and publishing it with the own name is called plagiarism. It’s easy to find information almost for any article through the internet, but it’s not easy to add that information into an article without falling into the plagiarism. Avoiding plagiarism is easy with the help of some simple tricks. Follow some easy steps while writing your article to ensure that your content is free of plagiarism. In this article, we will tell you how to check plagiarism free article and to avoid plagiarism in your article.

Steps To Avoid Plagiarism

Following are the steps to avoid plagiarism:

Take Your Time

Plagiarism mostly happens with an intimidating deadline and when you need to get the next task finished quickly. Hence, the first step should be to make sure that you have plenty of time to the writing process. Make sure you have enough time for double checking and editing the content so that you don’t have anything left in there that you didn’t write yourself.

Keep Track Of Sources

If you use someone else information, mention it below. Better yet, provide a link to them while writing or place the link into the draft. That way you will stay aware of what’s your own written and what have been taken from other people.

Read more than one source

In most cases, the danger of plagiarism also shows up when you limit your research. If your article is completely based on single content, you easily run the danger of sticking to its original formatting, phrasing, and other identifiable features. So, do broad research and read or learn through as many sources as you can.

Use Quotes

If you simply want to lift the text exact from your resource materials, you should quote other peoples’ text on your blog post and provide a link to the online resource or the site you took it from.

Attribute

In this case, the same goes if you plan to include a point or an original idea from the alternative source. Even if you’re expressing it in your words, make sure to place a link. This not only frees you from the plagiarism but it’s also a better option regarding SEO.

Re-Paraphrase

When spreading information that does need to be transferred to everyone (because it is collective knowledge), make sure to re-paraphrase or rewrite it. Must keep that in mind publishing the content in same language or phrasing will only get you punished for plagiarism.

Check

Finally, probably it is the best way to confirm your article is plagiarism free is to check. That does not mean, just to edit your content until its unique completely, but also, run it through a plagiarism checkers mentioned in the list below. These checkers will compare your content to available web sources and will notify you whether your content is completely free from plagiarism or not.

How To Check Plagiarism Free Article With Following Tools

if you have are searching for, how to check plagiarism free article? Use following tools to re-check your content before publishing it. It may take few minutes but will save you from lots of headache concerning plagiarism.

1. Plagiarism Checker By Small SEO Tools

It is a free online plagiarism tool that will run your article or blog through Google and other search engines, phrase by phrase, and provide % score on its uniqueness. It takes some time to perform the check for longer content, but the sweep seems to be detailed. It can perform maximum of 1000 words per check

2. WorldEssays Plagiarism Checker

It is another free plagiarism checker. An unregistered visitor can sweep up to five times per month. It works very well and can successfully list all sources of the plagiarized content available in the article.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly is a paid tool which apparently runs your content through 8 billion websites. Grammarly plans start from $11.66/month on a yearly contract and can extend up to $29.95/month. It is mostly used by professionals who need to check a lot of text every day.

4. Copyscape

A plagiarism tool that will not only help you find a copied content on the web but their premium version also enable the user to check their work for originality and uniqueness.

5. Duplichecker

Duplichecker is also a free online content checker, with no maximum words/search. Unregistered users can only be able to search one time. Registered users can unlimited searches, and it is completely costless. This checker enables two options ‘Copy/Paste’ and online ‘File Uploader’.

Conclusion

Be sure to edit your article carefully and check for plagiarism before publishing. The steps above are essential for content writing. Using plagiarism checker services is a considerable way to assess your anti-plagiarism skills and paraphrasing.

 

Continue Reading

SEO

SEO Techniques That No More Work In The Year 2016

SEO Techniques That No More Work in the Year 2016

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) provides great help to improve traffic on websites by getting it to a top-rank placement in (SERP) Search Engine Results Page such as Bing, Google, Yahoo, and many others. Some of the strategists may say that SEO is dead, which is not true at all. As the matter of fact, SEO has died for the people who have failed to adapt to the dynamic rules. These rules change almost every month and increase the requirements of tools, knowledge, skills and patience. Below are the SEO techniques that no more work in the year 2016

SEO Techniques That No More Work in The Year 2016

SEO techniques that have worked great until yesterday might not work at all tomorrow. Indeed, with the growing rate of upgrades by Google it doesn’t matter if your website traffic graph was at the top yesterday, you may see it going down tomorrow.

It is important to keep in mind, that we should have a look at the following 7 SEO techniques that no more work in the year 2016. Indeed, they were the best methods five years back, but now they do nothing more than harming your site. They are:

Focusing On Quantity Of Links Over Quality

If you’re still using large numbers of links to boost your website’s ranking, it’s the time you should stop doing it and focus on the quality of links. Because it is more important to provide the quality links than stuffing loads of links. After all, Google has said that the websites can have as many links as they are in a reasonable amount.

Putting keywords in Meta description

Almost a decade back, it was a good technique to put keywords in the meta description, and it also used to get users’ results. But after 2009 (per Google’s new rules) the keywords are no longer used as an SEO ranking factor. But this doesn’t mean that you should ignore the metadata descriptions. You should provide the metadata descriptions by writing them with keeping the audience in mind so that they can understand what the website is about.

You should provide the metadata descriptions by writing them with keeping the audience in mind so that they can understand what the website is about.

Overdoing keywords – high keyword density

Many strategists may say that over stuffing the keywords in web content, meta descriptions, titles, etc. is useful, but nowadays this is not the case. While Google has not given any specification about keyword density over stuffing keywords in your web content and a large number of times that a keyword appears in metadata, webpage, descriptions, and titles, in particular, it can harm the SEO rankings of your site.

Duplicating content

Google has provided a detailed notice about the Duplication of the content regarding SEO. They agree with the idea of many websites that requires the duplicate content, but this only includes printer versions of web pages and the forums that provide the content aimed at saleable items and mobile devices that are linked via URLs. If the mentioned content is not your idea of duplicating a content for your web, then you will be charged for manipulating the search results.

If the mentioned content is not your idea of duplicating content for your web, then you will be charged for manipulating the search results.

Do Not Waste Time On Adding Images To Your Content

It is also one the SEO techniques that no more work in the year 2016. For a time being, it was acceptable to oversight the images and hope for a good ranking without using any alt text image. Eliminating the images on your articles or your sites will make you miss a tool which can be important. Search engines need to find any images on websites. Therefore, it is important to provide alt-text describing images for the Google to know what it returns.

A Better Ranking for More Traffic

It is a misconception that high ranking helps to attract more traffic to your site. Appearing on the top list is one thing, but attracting visitors is completely a different story. There are couple of reasons behind this misconception which states as:

  • Your content strategy is not appropriate.
  • Your meta descriptions are not attractive.

Provide More Pages to Get More Traffic

Some SEO experts may tell you to have more pages to get more traffic on your site. Likewise, link building, if content writing is done for the only purpose of filling the number of pages, it won’t work. It is important to focus more on the quality rather than quantity. Only good quality content can help you to increase your site ranking. But if your content is no good, all those pages you have created are just a waste of time.

Conclusion

These outdated practices were used to be productive years ago. In modern times, it is crucial for SEO strategists to understand and adapt the latest methods very quickly. The best techniques to go with SEO is to keep yourself updated with the modern trends and implement them to get results and leave those SEO techniques that no more work in the year 2016.

Continue Reading

Trending