Cave in. Cry Uncle.

I’ve talked about rebuilds before, and I’m sure many of you have done your fair share. What I am really curious about is your individual decision criteria for when a PC can’t be stabilized by spyware and virus removal, manual tweaks etc. This is in the context of dealing with a machine that is not your own (client, customer, friend, relative, etc). For the sake of argument, also assume that the term “repair” refers to software and OS only, not hardware.

Naturally, there are some no-brainer cases that you can just tell immediately that there’s no sense in trying the repair approach. The PC practically levitates and spews pea soup. Time to rebuild. But many times, it’s not so clear.

I try to be as pragmatic as I can when deciding on repair vs. rebuild. Part of my assessment criteria includes:
- How unstable is the system currently?
- Antivirus software installed? Running? Up to date?
- How much junk can you find and remove with a complete AV scan, followed up with Antisypware tools such as Adaware, Spybot, MS Antispyware.
- How is disk health (defrag, scandisk, etc)

But this is where things start to get interesting from a logical perspective… because by the time you run through all your diagnostic and corrective routines, you start to rack up a lot of time. If you’ve developed a sound methodology for rebuilds, there is a break-even point at which the time it takes for a rebuild starts to sound more attractive.

Before I make the decision to rebuild, I ask myself (and the PC’s owner) a couple of things.
- Do you have the original PC mfr’s OS recovery and driver CDs and CDs for all the applications you need on the machine?
- Do a quick mental inventory of “must-have” data and files
- How do you access, manage and store your e-mail?
- What is the capacity of your coffee machine?

I never travel without my portable USB 2.0 HDD (20gb, bus-powered) and USB Flash Drive. I use them regularly whenever I do rebuilds. I also make sure that I scan them both regularly to make sure nothing nasty swims upstream to my PCs. And when I am done with the rebuild, I remove the user files from my drive, but not before I archive them to CD or DVD to be put in my hardcopy file on the client. I had one occasion where a client had their laptop stolen two weeks after I rebuilt it. I was able to restore most of their data from CD, and now the user is religious about doing their own backups.

So Gnomies, talk to me… how do you personally approach the repair vs. rebuild question? What tools and methods do you use? What frustrates you the most?