Bringing technical clarity to the unknown

New computer day game plan

07 Jul 2026 🔖 windows devops
💬 EN

Table of Contents

My PC’s been in limp mode for two years, and I finally ordered a new-to-me replacement. Given the equipment I have on hand, and the impracticality of buying much more in 2026’s era of price gouging, here’s the plan. (How lucky that I’ve gotten to learn a lot about enterprise “endpoint” management over the last few years. Potentially a game changer. This will be my first round of trying to do “new laptop day” in a repeatable, low-pain fashion.)

Day -2: before machine arrives

  1. ✔️ Learn the F-keys, so I can bootup as indicated below. Memorize, write down, tape to monitor, or whatever.
    • Google search LLM summary says:
      • Windows in general:
      • Acer:
        • Boot Menu: F12 or Esc
        • BIOS/UEFI: F2 or Deldel
      • Asus:
        • Boot Menu: F8 or Esc
        • BIOS/UEFI: F2 or Del
      • Dell:
        • Boot Menu (e.g. WinRE access): F12 (when the Dell logo appears)
        • BIOS/UEFI: F10 (but maybe also hidden below F12?)
      • HP:
        • Boot Menu: F9 or Esc
        • BIOS/UEFI: F10
      • Lenovo:
        • Boot Menu (e.g. WinRE access): F12 (when the Lenovo logo appears)
        • BIOS/UEFI: F1 or F2, depending on model
  2. ✔️ Have two spare flash USB drives handy.
  3. ✔️ Have a spare USB WiFi card handy.
  4. ✔️ Have enough desk space, power outlets, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc. handy for ergonomics. Set up the desk.
  5. ✔️ Have two spare USB external drives handy (for sizes, see day -1: physical reboxability).
    • ✔️ Format the matchy-matchy-sized spare USB external drive meant as a “day -1” clone target.
    • ✔️ Validate the quality of that new one I’ve got sitting around.
  6. ✔️ Make a bootable Win11-ready backup-management flash USB and label it so I remember which one it is.
  7. ✔️ Decide what I desire in my autounattend.xml and populate it (Schneegans can help).
    • ☐ Throw my favorite PowerShell scripts from version control onto it, too. Might as well have them handy the moment the clean install is done, since the clean-install USB just turns into a normal file USB after clean-install and first-login.
    • ☐ Ditto the installer .exe for my favorite backup-scheduling software – might as well have it handy; there’s probably plenty of room to spare on the clean-install USB flash drive.
    • ✔️ Biggest outstanding question: exactly how much drive formatting of the new PC’s internal disk will I want Win11-unattended-install to perform?
      • (It could be nice to leave the recovery partition the way the new PC vendor had it set up for me.)
        • (Decided: looks like I already had it making its own recovery partition. Leaving it as it was.)
    • (Loaded old file back into Schneegans’s tool and proofread it. Looks good to me.)
      • ‼️ WARNING! I keep my version-controlled copy set with a product key prepopulated that’s all 0s, which is good for that, but bad for install.
        • On “day -2,” when making this USB, actually bother to set it to the real license key I want to use or the clean-install will take its version from the UEFI-stored key.
          • (Fix: just clean-install again once I have the real product key in there, this time with the USB set up correctly.)
    • ‼️ Another consideration: this computer was easy because I’m rocking a 1-big-disk C:\ drive setup and hoping for the best, but if I’d had 2 internal disks, I’d want this, as well as some of my “day 0” steps, to deal w/ getting user accounts’ documents and stuff set up onto a secondary D:\ drive.
  8. 🤷‍♀️ Make a bootable Win11-clean-install (download latest from Microsoft to reduce later update lag) flash USB with my autounattend.xml on it in the appropriate way.
    • ✔️ Burn it, using my prepare-oscleaninstall-bootdrive.ps1 script I already wrote.
    • ✖️ Validate that it works as desired by clean-installing a VM with it, using a spare Win11 key of my own, on one of my spare computers that’s already rocking an all-purpose hypervisor.
      • (Skipped; felt lazy)
  9. ✔️ Have “my usual daily backup” USB external drive handy (needed on day 0+).

Day -1: make physical machine reboxable

My new computer’s under warranty, so if I realize, at some point, that I’ve got a lemon, I might need to be able to restore it back into the exact shape in which I got it.

(Note: “day -1” involves a lot of waiting on disk I/O against hacky old disks and USB adapters that are all I’m willing to pay for in this era of price gouging, particularly if anything goes wrong and has to be repeated or done in a slower sector-by-sector way, so, seriously, expect it to take a whole day, if not more. Do not get excited about moving on to “day 0” today, and perhaps not even tomorrow or the next day. Schedule a lot of long walks outside and chopping vegetables / folding laundry inside.)

-1A: physical inspection

  1. ✔️ Unbox.
  2. ✔️ Pop the case but don’t touch anything.
  3. ✔️ Open a support ticket if anything visually looks wrong.
    • (It didn’t.)
  4. ✔️ Put the lid back on.
  5. ✔️ Plug in power, and a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

-1B: disk backup

  1. ✔️ Plug in two USB external storage drives:
    1. ✔️ A just-formatted drive of equal size to the drive shipped inside new PC.
    2. ✔️ A big ol’ drive with at least as much space free as the drive shipped inside the new PC.
  2. ✔️ Plug in my bootable USB flash drive that comes w/ my backup-management software on it.
  3. ✔️ Power up the new PC and quickly press the appropriate F-key to make it boot into the backup-management flash USB.
  4. 🤷 Clone the new PC’s internal disk onto the USB drive of equal size.
    • (Stymied, haven’t figured out how to make it happen. Something’s reporting as wrong with the master file table (“MFT”) of the C:\ partition of the drive shipped inside the new PC. Best I could do was restore from the full-image, which seems to report slightly different partition sizes, but oh well. Further compressed imaging works against the restore pseudo-clone as a source, but no compressed imaging works against the internal drive.)
  5. 🤷‍♀️ Image the new PC’s internal disk as a file on the free space of the big USB drive.
    • (Not thrilled about doing a no-compression every-sector image, because I hate the idea of having to leave this much space occupied on my spare USB disk for the whole time the warranty’s valid, and it’s taking so much longer than it needs to when the factory disk is only about 60GB full across all its partitions put together, but at least it doesn’t fail as soon as it starts, so it might be the only thing I can get to work! Will definitely want to skip to -1E VM validation right away, if this is the only backup I’m going to be able to preserve of the “just-unboxed” internal drive state.)
      • ✔️ Big-image succeeded. Now using it to “restore” onto the “equal-sized disk”, as the next-best thing to a clone. I just noticed that the equal-sized disk is actually a few GB smaller than the internal disk, so maybe that was the problem with the clone.
        • ✔️ See if compressed images will work now, either from the internal disk or this freshly-pseudo-cloned one, using the “big” USB thing as the file target.
          • (Only from the restored pseudo-clone, which backup tool shows isn’t exactly the same occupied size per partition. Dang.)
  6. ✔️ Power down the new PC and unplug both USB storage drives.

-1C: OS license backup (postponed)

Note: no luck, can’t seem to find a way to get into it. Will just have to table until “day 0” at end of clean install.

  1. ☐ Leave the backup-management flash USB in for now, in case it helps w/ the PowerShell below.
  2. ☐ Power up the new PC and quickly press the appropriate F-key to get into a PowerShell CLI that can help me extract the OEM Win11 key shipped by the new PC’s vendor. (Might be booting into my backup-management flash USB; might be booting into the internal hard drive’s recovery mode or something.)
    • WinRE from X:\ just has cmd.exe with a lot of commands missing or incompatible with WinRE/WinPE modes, so haven’t been able to get it off that on the backup-management flash USB. Waiting for backup attempts to complete so I can reboot into system boot menu & see if there’s some sort of GUI copy of the OS license key, or to see if anything that came w/ the computer’s WinRE/WinPE works any better than the one from my backup-management flash USB.
  3. ☐ Write down the OEM Win11 key on paper, and also put it into a cloud-based secrets vault.
  4. ☐ Power down the new PC and pop out the backup-management flash USB.

-1D: validate OS license backup quality (cancelled)

  1. (cancelled:) Validate that the OEM Win11 key works by trying it out in an autounattended clean-install Win11 VM, on one of my spare computers that’s already rocking an all-purpose hypervisor.
    • Update: Don’t do this! My colleague thinks they recall that Windows user licenses shipped with PCs are somewhat bound to hardware, so testing them on a different computer (or VM) could either:
      • invalidate it for my new PC, or at least
      • remove one allowed hardware update of the new computer from the license.

-1E: validate disk backup quality

  1. ✖️ Validate that the big-USB-drive image works as expected by seeing what happens when I boot it up in a VM, on one of my spare computers that’s already rocking my backup-management vendor’s specialized hypervisor.
    • Maybe repeat a few times to make sure that even if I proceed into setup, if I start up a fresh VM w/ that image, it always loads into the first-boot sequence and always lets me set up Windows as a clean first-boot sequence.
    • (Skipped; felt lazy when it didn’t finish bootup right away.)

-1F: organization

  1. ☐ Label the two backups with sticky notes, etc. as being what I’ll need before initiating any sort of new-PC return if I have to make a warranty claim.
  2. ☐ Put the two backups into appropriate long-term storage (airgapped, cloud, etc.).

-1G: sleep peacefully (reboxably)

Congratulations, me!

This physical machine can now feel comfortably “mine” (because I now have a “vendor’s” restoration plan).

Day 0: install clean OS

0A: prepare the internal disk if desired

  1. ✖️ If I don’t have my clean-unattended-install’s autounattend.xml configured to do drastic formatting of the new PC’s internal disk, consider booting off my backup-management flash USB and using its PowerShell to wipe the new PC’s internal disk clean and format it.
    • (Unsure if I really want to do this. It could be nice to leave the recovery partition the way the new PC vendor had it set up for me.)
    • (Looks like it’ll wipe for me, based on Schneegans’s reinterpretation of how I have my file set up.)

0B: clean install

  1. ✔️ Plug in my bootable unattended-clean-install USB flash drive.
  2. ✔️ Power up the new PC and quickly press the appropriate F-key to make it boot into the unattended-clean-install flash USB.
  3. ✔️ Do the install, and any weird little things that had to be done manually, e.g.
    • ✔️ I think I remember that I prefer not to hardcode in passwords for secondary OS user accounts into autounattend.xml, so I need to do those manually
    • ✖️ (If I had 2 internal drives, I’d want documents and such for all user accounts on the D:\ drive.).
  4. Power down the new PC and pop out the unattended-clean-install flash USB.

0C: online updates

  1. ✔️ Power up the new PC…
    • Optional: …and quickly press the appropriate F-key to make it boot into the internal disk, if I’d rather leave it on that as primary
  2. ✔️ Log into my clean install.
  3. ⌛ Give it internet access and let it run Windows Update, etc.
    • Note: keep a USB wifi card handy. Clean-install might’ve knocked out the OS having a driver for, & being able to see, the built-in WiFi card.
      • (Alternatively, I can probably get a .exe on another computer for the new PC’s serial number and throw it onto a thumb drive, if I don’t want to have to deal with my WiFi card being named “WiFi 2” after you get that .exe with the USB Wi-Fi card.)
    • Note: open a browser, go to the vendor’s web site, enter the serial number, get told to download and install their creepware, and be too tired to decide to do everything manually and just let it creep on my computer because its splash page promised it wouldn’t. Well, and then do the “download all” of all the manual drivers, too, for good measure, out of paranoia.
      • ☐ Well, that didn’t go so well, and I don’t know in what order to run all these downloaded .exe files. I should probably put them into version control, and also should probably script running them as I figure it out, in case I ever need to do a fresh clean install, and put that into version control, too. That or I should add a step to the top of this “day 0” to use Schneegans to modify autounattend.xml to do the driver installation after grabbing them all once the hardware arrives and I know my service tag number. (Actually, I suppose that could also be in parallel on “day -1” alongside unbox-backup.)

0D: validate secure boot certificates

  1. ✔️ Reboot and quickly press the appropriate F-key and see if that one June 2026 UEFI issue with Microsoft certificates needs attention. Fix if so.
    • (Was already up-to-date as shipped; yay.)

0E: clean up clean-install USB

  1. ✔️ Set the product key in my autounattend.xml file on the clean-backup USB back to all 0s.

0F: nap peacefully (cleanly)

Congratulations, me!

I am now bootable into my accounts on a cleanly-installed Win11 operating system.

0G: schedule recurring backup

  1. ✔️ Install, and punch my license key into, my backup-management desktop software, on the new PC.
    • Note: to figure out which installation settings to check in my backup-management software, do add or remove programs -> modify on an old computer’s installation and see what I had it as
  2. Plug in the USB drive I plan to use for “my usual daily backup” and give it its usual drive letter mapping.
  3. Set up, and kick off a first run of, regularly scheduled backup imaging of the new PC’s internal disk.

0H: validate recurring backup

  1. Eject the “usual daily backup” drive.
  2. Validate whether the just-made image’s file contents are explorable from one of my spare computers that has my backup-management desktop software also installed.
  3. If not, troubleshoot until they are.

0I: resume recurring backup

  1. Plug the “usual daily backup” drive into the new PC (and possibly velcro it onto the case), so that it’ll be ready for the next scheduled run.
  2. Power down the new PC; day 0 is done.

0J: sleep peacefully (cleanly and managedly)

Congratulations, me!

I’ve now basically got this lump of metal set up like “new-laptop-day” feels in an enterprise. It’s cleanly imaged, and it’s auto-managed appropriately.

Day 1: customize and restore personality

Congratulations, me! I’ve just been issued a well-managed “new laptop” by my “enterprise endpoint management” department (heh – me).

Time to make it more than an OS – time to make it a system that I can truly call MINE. 💃

Remember, I’m working off a clean OS install, so I’ve got a little bit more to do than I might in, say, a “rollback” to an old backup of a well-worn image.

  1. I’ve got meaningful executables to install before bringing over files.
  2. When I bring over meaningful files from wherever they currently live, I’ll need both:
    • a lot of config-related files (e.g. for all those executables) & commands-to-be-run that might already be present/configured in, say, a “rollback” to an old backup of a well-worn image
    • “the usual” (my pictures & documents, etc.)

If I want to get really paranoid, I can manually back up the new PC’s internal disk after each major piece of work, but remember, I’ve also already got dailies going.

IMPORTANT: write things down into remote-backed-up version control. Preferably automating as I go w/ a “GitOps” / “paper plates, not fine china; cattle, not pets” mentality, as, say, idempotent PowerShell scripts. But at the very least as Markdown files / PowerShell comments / etc. (lol, the notes as the Git; my hands and eyes as the Ops.)

  • Why: This computer, too, will blue-screen-of-death on me one day, and a major life improvement I hope to start engaging in with this new-computer process is to make “clean install to full personality” far less toil & duration than it’s been historically.

Notes as I work

  • Saving things not on thumb drives to %USERPROFILE%/tempyyyymm folder for now, to make it easier to just lift-and-shift Documents and such (trying to leave those empty).
  • Notepad: turn Copilot off, autocorrect off, spell check off, autosave off, word wrap off.
  • For some reason, even though this computer totally has a WiFi card, I must have managed to destroy Windows’s awareness of it with my autounattend.xml or something. Network & Internet settings -> Advanced Network Settings -> Network reset and letting it restart didn’t help. Hmmmm, maybe the clean install didn’t pick up on this hardware’s driver. 🙁

Week 2: decommission the old computer

  1. At some point, make my final backup image of the old computer’s disks and label them well.
    • (Try booting the image up in a VM on a spare computer with a backup-management vendor’s hypervisor, if I want to validate that they really-really work.)
  2. To force my hand, boot the old computer off my backup-management flash USB and use its PowerShell to wipe its internal disks clean and format them. Yes, all the way – even recovery partitions. I want to completely sever all attachment to this computer’s former personality. I have a new computer now, and its personality is my new daily-driver PC-personality.
  3. Power down the old computer, pull out the backup-managent flash USB, and put the old computer into a closet until I figure out what exactly it’s “for.”
    • (Theoretically, I might be able to clean-image it and get the stupid thing to stop blue screen of deathing, and then have a spare computer for … unsure what, but … something.)
    • (Maybe if I get my “days -1 to 1” work automated enough, I can occasionally practice doing full “clean install and re-personality-population” failover drills on it, and have it handy in case the new PC, or some other PC in my care, starts BSOD-ing?)
  4. Clean up legacy backup images from the old PC, keeping just the final validated backup image. The rest are no longer needed; that computer’s personality no longer exists, so older editions of that personality no longer need restoration ever again. And in today’s disk prices, I need to free up unused gigabytes for keeping my active fleet backed up!
  5. Clean up the desk from being such a “job site” – get everything all tidied up the way I “normally” like having it.
    • (Including getting visually appealing new side tables, or mounting equipment if it seems like the desk can handle the weight, or whatever, since I switched form factor when I picked my new PC.)
      • It looks like the vendor made a VESA monitor stand that holds the new PC. Find one (buy), as well as a monitor in the size I like with additional fast USB ports aplenty, as well as built-in speakers, mic, and webcam (buy), to attach onto the VESA stand.

Aftermath miscellany

  1. Speaking of my Win11 keys, write down all those spare Win11 keys I own but haven’t taken the time to write down yet, before something happens to destroy the originals.
    • (Put it on the backlog with the crafts for my relatives and the website migrations for my friends.)
  2. Vaguely keep an eye out for parts deals (memory, internal drives, external drives, DVD drive, etc.) and possibly hoard a smidge.
    • One day, after it’s already out of warranty anyway, I’m going to want to upgrade the new PC, or add better backup to more PCs, or build a NAS or something, and parts ain’t what they used to be, in terms of price.
  3. Vaguely keep an eye out for deal-of-the-millennium PC deals, since while this was a decent new PC, it was a little bit of a desperation PC, and for the right price, it could be nice to start this all over again yet again but be happier with the setup for longer.
  4. Remember to stay on top of all my various backup & recovery drills that I decide are worth keeping myself engaged in. All PCs can suddenly blue screen of death, and this new PC is no exception.
    • Ditto for all the other PCs in my care.
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