What is considered as 'best practice'?

[sorcerer]

I've got a laptop in (from a residential customer, not a business) that's running very slowly and I suspected a failing hard drive, so as usual, the first thing I did was to image the drive before running any tests. Acronis True Image did the job well and also verified the image, so I'm as sure as anyone can be that the backup will work if/when needed.

I thought that this would be a good opportunity to try out the new 'TechUSB' tool from RepairTech (the guys that Nick and his D7 are teaming up with) and that confirmed my suspicion of a failing drive (I also confirmed it with Toshiba's own drive diagnostics for a 'belt and braces' approach), and it also found the presence of Trojan.Tdss-7762.

The laptop is 18 months old and, given the presence of the trojan, the phenomenon of 'Windows Rot' and also a couple of file system problems that TechUSB also found, my question is this: because it needs a new hard drive, would it be considered best practice to use the recovery discs and make it as a factory-fresh, almost untouched machine, or, because the customer has got the machine set up the way they like it, would you put the image on the new drive to restore it to the way it was and then fix the problems - or is this something that you ask the customer what they would like you to do?

[Martyn]

My opinion only. I always talk to the customer and give them the choice if the install is old say 3 or 4 years. Give them the alternatives and also point out what might not be obvious to them. Have you got the cds for programs they have installed? Office, Photoshop what have you. I also ask do they want all the profiles put back on, often they don't. It might have been a family pc with 4 users but the situation has changed, so ask. That is a common situation. As regards the hard drive, if it has a bad sector or two I might run HDD Regenerator on it to get some more life out of it but always tell them about it and to make sure they are setup for backups. They may decide to have the drive replaced. Give them the choice but with your advice.

[sorcerer]

Cheers Martyn, good advice there sir.