The Definitive Checklist to Reinstalling Windows 10 (2021)

Hello, this is David, and today we'll be talking about the definitive checklist for reinstalling Windows. Before we begin, it's important that I go over a few assumptions about your process. The first one is that you're reinstalling Windows on the same machine. Secondly, that you're reinstalling the same version of Windows, so you're not going from 10 to 8 or 8 to 10 or anything like that. You are currently an administrator on your account, and lastly that you're not encrypting your files at all. So like using BitLocker or something like that, the odds are good that you're not, but I just wanted to include that in here just in case. So the first and very most important step is to back up your files. There's a lot of good options here. You can use the built-in Windows 10 backup options, whether it's File History or the Backup and Restore method. I personally like using an application called FreeFileSync, and this is how I have mine set up. Take note of the left here, we have the C drive and the F drive, and on the right we have this B drive. The C drive, everyone has a C drive if they're using Windows, that's your main hard drive that runs your operating system. And I personally have a second hard drive that's for files, I have labeled it F. And on the right here you can see this B drive, that is my backup drive. So I would recommend that everyone purchases an external hard drive that is enough space to back up all of your files, which I have done here as an example. If you use FreeFileSync, which I do recommend, make sure you have it set to mirror, and that way anything that happens on the left, meaning your C drive/other drives that you have, will be mirrored to your right. So if a file gets updated, that will carry over. If a file gets deleted, that that same file will get deleted on the right, etc. So as long as you're backed up and you have your files in good order, I would recommend running one of these before you reinstall Windows just to make sure all your files are up to date. And here you can see I just take the entire C drive, the entire F drive, and back those up. You can't be too careful. And that way you have every little file you need. Step number 2 is to make sure that your settings are saved across your operating system and as many applications as you can. So in this example, we'll open Settings, go to Accounts, go to Sync Your Settings, and make sure that these settings are on. Now this only works if you have a Microsoft account connected to your Windows PC, and Microsoft has been fairly pushy about this, so chances are you do. And if you don't, That's fine. Just know that some of your preferences and themes will not be saved. So you have to manually re-add those all back after you reinstall Windows. That's not necessarily a big deal. But where number 2 really comes into play here is you'll want to think about your browser, maybe. So if you use Google Chrome, you'll want to make sure your Google account is synced with that. So all your bookmarks and all of your browser settings and passwords are saved. Or if you use Firefox, same thing there. And any other application you might use, if it has a cloud backup capability, you'll want to think about signing into that and taking advantage of it before you reinstall Windows so that your settings are saved. Number 3 is save a list of your programs and associated product keys. So to do this, you actually have the ability to view all the programs on your computer, by going to Control Panel, Programs, and Programs and Features, and you basically get a list right here. Now you can write this down, you can take a screenshot of it, but that's a tad laborious, so I recommend using PowerShell to get your list of programs, and I'll show you how to do that right now. Simply right-click the Start button, then go over to Windows PowerShell, and you can select Admin if you'd like. This should pop up, and in the description of this video, I've included a command you can use. So all you should have to do is copy it, make one change, and that one change is changing the name David to whatever your user folder name is to get to the correct Documents folder so that it exports to the right location. And this will basically generate a list of programs for you and then spit out a TXT file with that information. So all you have to do is paste this and hit enter. And after you hit enter, you should find this installedprograms.txt file. And here it is. So it lists out all the programs that you have and the date they were installed, the version number, etc. Very handy stuff. And I would save this. So I've actually created a little USB, uh, drive that has some of this information. So I've also created a separate product_keys.txt. This is an example, these are obviously not real product keys, but the idea here is you would put your actual product keys for a few of the applications that need them. Maybe you paid for a certain program and that has a, you know, an associated product key. And you'll always want to make sure you know what your Windows product key is. If you don't, do not fear. There is an application called ProduKey, which is very excellent. For displaying your product key for Windows. And the reason why you'll need this is so that when you reinstall Windows, during the setup process, you can include that key, and you can keep your version of Windows activated, which is obviously very important. Something else that's fairly important to do is to make sure that you export any settings that you have in your applications. So for example, uh, there's an application called Stream Deck that I use for streaming on Twitch, and it has a feature where you can export settings. And the idea is if you export your settings, you can re-import them later. So if I'm going to reinstall Windows and I reinstall Stream Deck, all I have to do is import this file and then all my settings are saved. Not every app or program has a feature like that, but a lot of them do, especially ones that are fairly complex in setup. They'll be, they'll be ways you can export your settings. So just look out for that. The next thing is, if there's no other better option, you can simply take a screenshot of the settings that you have in a particular program. So here's an example where I saved my settings from OBS on the video screen, and this is just so that I can see it and reference it again when I reinstall this program and make sure the settings match. The next step is to unlink any associated apps from this computer. So an example might be Dropbox. You generally have a limit of how many devices you can have paired with a Dropbox account, so make sure that you attend to those. So in this example, I'll show you the option for Dropbox. It's just under Preferences, under Account, and then this Unlink Dropbox option. Will unlink Dropbox from this computer, and then of course when I reinstall Windows, I will simply relink it to my account, and everything will be fine. Uh, other examples might be some versions of Microsoft Office or the Adobe Creative Cloud, depending on how you have yours installed. Keep some installation files so that you can make your installing of programs a bit easier, and this is particularly important for drivers. So I'll show you an example. Under this folder I created called installation files, I have a folder called drivers. And the reason why this is important is let's say your computer relies on a certain Ethernet driver to get internet, or a certain display driver to show your picture properly on your screen. So these are examples of some files that you'll want to have on hand and ready to go that you can just automatically install from the get-go and not have to worry about it. Windows 10 generally does a pretty good job of installing these drivers from the get-go after you install Windows 10, but sometimes they might miss a few things and you can never be too careful in that regard. So make sure you go to your manufacturer's website, whether it's the manufacturer from your motherboard or your laptop, your computer, whatever it may be, and grab the latest files just in case. I've also packaged some of these that I always install, and Zune obviously doesn't have a version as of, a newer version as of, who knows, years ago. So I don't need to worry about grabbing the most recent version, the same thing with AutoHotkey. So I just include these as examples so that when I install my version of Windows, I can just run these programs and then the programs will install and I won't have to go anywhere to find them. So I'm personally in the habit of grabbing these and you might not, that's perfectly okay, but that's just something that I do to save myself a few extra steps. The next step is pretty important because you're going to want to know which drives are which, and you're going to want to have your product key on hand. So what I would do is go to This PC and examine your drives. Make sure you have a very clear understanding of which drive is which. In my case, The local disk, which is the C drive, which you will have also, I know that's where my operating system lives. That's also the smallest of my two internal drives. The second drive that I have is this F drive called Files, and that is 1 terabyte in size, whereas my C drive is only 250 gigabytes in size. So I'm very familiar with these two drives. I know what they are, but for your own setup, make sure you're really comfortable and familiar with those. And write down the drive letters so you remember what those are, and then also the volume size and whatever other details will help you remember which drive is which. Also take this time while you're writing these down to write down your Windows 10 product key so your installation goes a lot smoother. Now the very next step for this is not something I can really show you, but I'll describe it nonetheless. You'll want to disconnect any extra hard drives from your computer, so any backup drives, So in my particular instance, I have 3 attached external hard drives. I have this backup drive, this archive drive, and this one for games. The reason why you safely unplug those is you don't want to accidentally erase the wrong drive while you're installing Windows. So that's sort of a cautionary step that I would recommend. And the way to safely remove these would be to go to the tray icon down here and make sure you locate Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media. Right-click that, and then identify the correct drives to eject. And after you do that, make sure you unplug it from your computer. If it has a power source, you can keep that plugged in, no problem, but I would just do this for your own good. Alright, so at this point, you have your drive letters written down, you have all your files backed up, you have a very clear idea of the programs and product keys associated with those, and you are ready to reinstall Windows. So at this point, your computer is shut off, and you're either using a USB drive or using a disk or something, and you're reinstalling Windows. I'm not going to cover the intricacies of this particular step. I might in another video, but let's assume at this point you've installed Windows fresh. And it's, it's, uh, so in my case, the C drive is brand new. It's a new installation of Windows, and my F drive is untouched. It's exactly the same. I just did this recently, so this is fairly fresh in my mind. The next step I would do is visit a website called Ninite.com. Ninite.com is really awesome. This is not an ad, by the way, because you can basically select a bunch of common programs that you might use, download one.exe file, and install it all at once. It is fantastic. It has saved me so much time. The ones that I generally use are these, but this won't necessarily mean much to you. You might have different needs than I do, but the ones that I go for are generally the ones that you see in front of you. So once you're happy with the selection, you just click Get Your Nine-Nite. It then downloads the list. Click Save, and you just run it, and it just automatically installs the applications you selected for you. Very fantastic application. I definitely recommend it. I'll have a link to it in the description. Now finally, the last step is to make sure you are the owner of your folders and files, as well as making sure the drive letters are correct. So the first part let's tackle is the drive letters. So I would hit the Start button, I would type in the word Disk, And it starts as soon as you type in disk m, an option to create and format hard disk partitions will come up. And this is where you can change the drive letters. So if you reinstall Windows and maybe you, you connected your hard drives in a different order than when you previously had Windows installed, it's possible that Windows has changed the letters of your drives. Or maybe switch them around or something. So this is where you're going to want to make sure that you restore them to whatever you wrote down. So for this example, let's say I needed to change the letter of my F drive. All I would have to do is locate it on this list, right-click it, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths, and change it to the letter that I needed. Now be careful doing this, only do this if you really know what you're doing. Because this can sometimes lead to undesired behavior. And I would also say never ever change the C drive letter. Just never change it because Windows relies on the C drive as a common operating system drive. So definitely do not change that. And the last element of this is of course making sure you have ownership over your own files. So this doesn't apply to everybody, So if you only have one hard drive, internal hard drive, this won't apply to you. But like myself, I said earlier, I actually have two, one for my operating system and one for my personal files. You'll want to make sure you have ownership over these. So in my, my case, I would just right-click the David folder, which contains the bulk of my files. I would hit Properties. I would go to Security and hit Advanced. And from here, I would type in my username. Now again, this is assuming you're an admin, and you would either type in the name you use to log in or the email address associated with your Microsoft account. Either one can work. And if you click Check Names, something like this should pop up. And if you click OK, you're basically changing the ownership to yourself. And I like to select Replace Owner on Subcontainers and Objects. So when I click OK, you own all your stuff and there's no conflicts with ownership issues or anything like that, and you are good to go. So with that, I hope I've instilled some confidence in you if you're feeling reluctant about reinstalling Windows or doing a clean install or something like that, because I've personally done it many times and I followed these steps probably a half dozen times at least just for my own device, and I can assure you that they work very well. So if I missed anything, please let me know too. If you have like a tip or you have something that maybe I missed, I would love to hear about it. And as always, thank you so much for watching my videos. If you got any value out of it, I would really appreciate a like and a comment if you have something to say, and a subscribe to the channel if you believe it is worth it. So thank you again very much, and I will see you guys in the next video.