I’ve built hundreds of PC’s in my day. That includes dozens of one-off systems that I’ve configured and assembled for my own use as well as for friends, family, and customers. It also includes batches of new systems that I build during the summer at my full-time job. The following are just a couple of tips that I’ve picked up along the way that make the system-building process as painless as possible.

Fragmentation is  one of the primary ailments that infects a slow computer.  You might have heard the word before. Someone might have even taught you how to fix it.  But most of us don’t know what fragmentation is, how it occurs, and–unlike a virus or spyware–why we’re stuck living with fragmentation in our lives.  Without getting into too many technical details, let me explain what fragmentation is.

This problem is related to the previous article I wrote about loading text-mode drivers into a Windows XP installation source added to a Windows Deployment Toolkit (formerly called BDD) distribution share.  Because of an incompatibility between Windows XP and the way that Windows PE formats the hard drive by default, many users will find that, after the PE portion of the installation completes, the operating system will fail to load off the hard drive. Johan [...]