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Recently I’ve been redoing a few machines at work.  The great thing about reinstalling a Windows XP box is that I know everything is completely up to date and there always seems to be a nice performance increase associated with it.  The downside is that users tend to loose a lot of the little tweaks that they have done to personalize their machines.  This is just a short list of what I do to minimize the loss of customizations.  This is focused mainly on Windows XP and references some stuff from Office 2003.

1. Backup Personal Files

Its always important to talk with the user face to face and have them show you some of the things they have saved on the machine over the years.  Even though we have a policy that says you should not save things locally, everyone does it anyway.  We are not computer Nazis so we don’t restrict the machines to prevent this.  It is more of a CYA (cover your ass) policy that we can point to when they loose something important.

Most of the time you can get all the personal files by copying and backing up the My Documents, Favorites, and Desktop folders.  These 3 are found in the “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>” directory.  Every once in a while there are some folders/documents in the root of the ‘C’ drive.  Also be sure to check the desktop for folder shortcuts that point to somewhere on the local drive.  There have been numerous times in my career that I have found links to data in obscure places.  Its better safe than sorry.

2.Outlook autocomplete

Just about every user I’ve redone on our network complains that the autocomplete is gone.  They don’t know its called that but they do assume that I’ve lost all of their contacts because they used to be able to type the first letter and have a list of everyone they email.  Outlook autocomplete is stored in a .nk2 file located in “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” folder.  Copy this file back to the same location after Outlook is configured.  Its important to note that the .nk2 file is named after the mail profile of the machine.  If the mail profile on the old machine was ‘default’ then the file will be called ‘default.nk2′.  When the new machine is setup, either use the same profile name or rename the copy of the .nk2 file to match the new name or this will not work.

3. Word Autotext

The secretaries have all kinds of autotexts setup on their local machines that are specific to their needs.  A lot of them use 4 or 5 character combinations to automatically insert letter heads, electronic signatures, and other blocks of text used over and over again.  No one remembers to tell you they want this saved because they don’t remember the couple hours they spent setting this feature up.  I’ve started backing this up without thinking now.  Word autotext is stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates” in a file called Normal.dot  Copy this and place it in the exact same location on the new machine.

Some people may point out that if you back up the whole user profile from Documents and Settings you won’t lose any of that stuff and it would be a lot easier.  I’m against this method because 9 times out of 10 you are redoing a Windows machine because of some virus or spyware that you can’t seem to get rid of.  Chances are you will be pulling this problem over to the new machine because you are copying a lot of unnecessary files.  To keep that clean install feeling, I prefer to pull over only what is necessary.

This is just my opinion though.  What do you guys normally backup?