All in a nights work

My current laptop, a Lenovo Twist, has been getting increasingly unreliable, each time it crashes or needs a hard power off the risk of corruption increases and today it’s poor reliability reached the rebuild threshold.  I needed to hard reset it 3 times today, after the first reset Lotus Notes started closing down immediately after starting, after the second two applications lost their settings, after the third I lost an hours work.

I was unsure whether I had a hardware problem, some operating system corruption or a profile corruption or a mix.  It’s very hard to diagnose so the only real option is to start from scratch.  To be honest I’d wanted to do it for a while, so that I could get rid of all the Lenovo junk that comes pre-installed and get back to a PC that’s just as Microsoft intended, a disk format and a clean install is the only way.

A clean install is fairly painless now though, Windows 8.1 and Windows update take care of the vast majority of drivers,  Windows 8.1 backs up and downloads key settings from Onedrive, Chrome syncs favourites and extensions, Ninite installs most of my native apps in a few minutes, all my data and passwords are in the cloud, where possible I use Chrome web apps rather than desktop apps, and so it goes.

Still it’s an evening’s work to get everything installed and configured, and it will take the whole night for all of the cloud services to re-sync down onto the SSD.

The good news is that the Twist is lightning fast again, rock solid and clutter free.  A good return on investment if it lasts me another 6 months or more.

UPDATE : Once I started using the laptop it proved to be as unstable as ever

UPDATE2 : I did another rebuild, this time doing all installs in sequence after all the many Windows updates were complete, however I had to hard reset the laptop 3 times as Windows updates hung.

UPDATE3 : I got my old x200T laptop out of long term storage and everything installed and worked fine, much quicker than installing on the Twist somehow.