If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time installing and uninstalling new software – either to try the latest and greatest programs or for a project you may be working on.  As we all know, sooner or later this starts junking up your PC, and you will see Windows start to slow down.

In the past I’ve always kept a drive image using Ghost or some other imaging tool to help with this problem.  Using a drive image I could quickly revert back to a prior, clean,  version of my drive and get the performance back without spending a day (or more) reinstalling & tweaking Windows and all my applications.  This would also let me image a new drive, each time I upgraded to a larger or faster hard drive, again saving the full reinstall time.  This worked pretty well, but is still time consuming, and you have to remember to keep manually making drive images to keep everything up to date.

Since I’ve started testing Windows Home Server (WHS), I’ve thought this may be a great way to solve the problem.  And sure enough, it is. I was reading Charlie Kindel’s blog today (Charlie is the WHS PUM and founder inside of Microsoft), and he had a great post on doing just this.  In his case, he was just expanding an existing drive, but using this same concept you can upgrade a drive or revert back to a prior (cleaner) version of Windows.  Great to know!

On a side note, still tinkering with the WHS SDK, trying to find some ‘killer apps’.  Suggestions welcome 🙂