shahine.com/omar/

It used to be that I could just flatten a PC w/o thinking about what was there before I flattened it. Since I have both a C and D partition, I keep any data on my D partition (I move all my doc folders etc using the Tweak XP Powertoy). However, there are a few things you want to do before booting Windows and paving:

1. If you use any downloadable pay for music services, make sure to de-authorize the computer. This will save you at least 10–20 min later asking tech support for that service to manually de-authorize for you. I was constantly hitting my 5 machine limit with MSN Music because of this.
2. If you use any applications that create a persistent cache then back up that data. You will typically find all this stuff in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data although for some applications this will be located in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data
   1. FeedDemon comes to mind here. Since I use the NewsBin as well as flag posts a lot, I would like my new Windows install to have this data. I have lost numerous flagged posts because I forgot to backup the FeedDemon cache folder.
   2. Your Adobe Bridge Cache (this can save you a long time later)
   3. Your Microsoft Digital Media Suite 2006 Cache (ditto here)
3. Use the Save My Settings wizard in Office 2003 to easily carry over all your prefs from Office 2003 to the new machine. This comes in handy all the time.
1. Optionally manually migrate your Outlook Autocomplete history file to the new machine. Nothing sucks worse then having to look people up in the GAL if you can't spell their name.

update: added link to manually migrate the outlook autocomplete history.