Monday, March 29, 2010

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Backup and Restore computer drivers (Windows Xp, Vista, 7)

When it comes to reinstalling your operating system, and here I am talking about windows, we all agree that it is a real pain. First of all the OS installation, process takes almost always the same amount of time, then the drivers, then your usual programs (all at once or in time as soon as you need them)

In this post I’ll just discuss how you can jump with elegance over the critical step in installing your OS which is installing the drivers.

This can be done by backing-up drivers from the old system, and then restoring them inside the freshly installed system.

From the beginning I have to mention that this migration of drivers works normally when the new installed OS is the same as the old one. Depending on the drivers, driver migration from Vista to 7 and from 7 to Vista may also work.

Double Driver is a free tool that allows you to perform this backup/restore operation for all the drivers. It is the perfect driver manager as it enables you to do a lot of things such as: list your drivers, access full driver details, export and print the list, select exactly which drivers to backup, and how to restore drivers from a previous backup.

double driver

Adrian

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

How to force delete files in Windows 7 & Vista

Have you ever wanted to delete files from a previous windows installation, but you couldn’t because of a permission error.

permission

Most of the times, it is purely a problem of ownership over the files you wish to delete. If you are the administrator of the computer, than there is a quick solution of taking the ownership of the files, adding the Take Ownership in your right click context menu.

ownershipMenu

How to add this option in the context menu.
You have to download this file: InstallRemoveTakeOwnership.zip

Once you did this, extract the contents in a folder. There are two registry files insinde, one that adds the Take Ownership context menu option, the other that removes it.

Double click InstallTakeOwnershipOption.reg

Now right click the folder you want to delete, then select Take Ownership.


take Ownership

Once the operation is completed, you have the full ownership of the folder, and you can go further deleting the file.

To remove this option from the context menu, just click on the other registry file RemoveTakeOwnershipOption.reg

What if I still cannot delete the file

If the problem still persists, then it is not related just to permissions. We could be talking about a file blocked by the system, a damaged file…

If you are sure about what you want to do, I recommend in this case a more advanced solution, a tool that serves exactly this purpose - the Unlocker.

It can handle very well a number of special cases when it comes to deleting a file such as the Access denied, sharing violations, source in use, file in use, ..and so on.

Adrian