Having said that I would recommend a rebuild of your PC every year, it’s a bit galling that it’s nearly 2 years since I’ve done it myself. In fact that’s as long as I’ve had my Mesh PC, and I’ve never got around to it.

The reasons, though, are simple – I was afraid to. When I’ve self-built machines the past I knew exactly how they worked, where the software and drivers were, etc. But with someone else’s build, it’s not quite the same.

Anyway, I went for it yesterday. Mesh provide a recovery partition – but that turns out not work (it was looking for a non-existent drive). They also provide a CD (or is it a DVD?), but looking at this showed none of the installed software that the Mesh came with (Microsoft Works and a suite of media software). Obviously if I rebuilt with this I’d lose them all. Heading to the Mesh website gave me my answer – they expect you to reinstall Windows, but replacing the original build, which leaves software installations and document intact. This wasn’t my preferred choice so I “bit the bullet” and reformatted my drive and reinstalled Windows. So far, all is working well. The base drivers and software are now in place and I’ve configured it how I like it (to a certain level) – then I’ll make an image of the drive, followed by installing all the other software and drivers and making final changes.

I took the opportunity to try out the Beta version of TeraCopy – a fast file copier which works alongside the standard Windows copying facility. It really is excellent and really improved copying speeds. This is a good opportunity to check whether my day-to-day backup system is working. But, just in case it isn’t, I used Teracopy to copy all the essential files to an external HD.