About to reinstall windows - what should I backup?

[TheNiceGuy]

Hello all
I've been running the PC in my sig for a few years. I'm noticing some weird crash issues, and performance bugs. For example, I have an intermittent problem with flash or youtube videos green screening, unplayable lag in BFBC game (even offline) that used to run fine, very slow bootup times, random crahses, etc. So thought a clean reinstall of Vista 64 may help.
I've had to reistall windows before, and promptly regretted it. Despite backing up what I could think of, there seemed to be millions of things (such as web site account passwords), that toook months to get back or were lost forever.
Any idea what to back up for as clean a reinstall as possible?
Thank you

 

[postmortemIA]

Backup the windows activation file tokens.dat - if you reinstall windows on exact same PC you won't have to activate it.
Backup my documents, my pictures, my music folders
Backup your favorites (firefox sync for example)
Backup save data for each game you play
Microsoft has tool "windows easy transfer" that will backup most of your user data

They way I do it, on top of all listed above, is to go over each program found on start menu and ask myself whether there are any files I've created with it, and whether I have its installer on different partition.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.
-video drivers: I think I screwed this one up last time, as there were several choices that seemed viable.
-I only play BFBC2, which was installed from disc and had a million updates. Is it possible to just downlaod now or something as the data is all stored in Origin?

Thanks again

 

[TheNiceGuy]

I went ahead and installed W7 over my old vista. Everything seems to have gone well, except the HD is still almost full. It appears the old vista was saved somehow, ALL of it, under "old windows". Can I use this to reinstall my old programs and presets? Or is it likely the old bugs that motivated to do the reinstall in the first place will carry over as well???

 

[paul878]

NiceGuy, be nice to yourself and do a fresh install to avoid carrying over all the problems from your old installation of vista. After you done that and install all you core programs, use windows 7's back to make an image.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thanks Paul. I did a fresh install (not an upgrade) over the old vista, but it automatically saved the old windows in a huge file like 100gb on the c drive, called "Windows.old". Should I install again, wipeing the drive first? Or can I just delete the windows.old file and all is well?
Additionally, I had lots of problems before trying to uninstall/install video drivers. I even used drive wiper and just gimped things up. Simply uninstall/install the AMD drivers (ati catalyst suite) didn't work.
Thanks

 

[paul878]

You installed windows 7 on the same hard drive without doing a format, thats why you have windows.old. Personally I never do that, I back up my data and do a format install.
That way I could always restore to a KNOW good image if I ever have problems, without spend hours and hours doing reinstall and update again.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Ok I'll try it again. Format dive. I swear it didn't give that option off the DVD. But I'll try it again.
I also uninstalled the windows radeon 4800 driver, then installed the latest catalyst suite from ati site. It goes thtough the process, with completede notice, but would not show up anywhere on the pc, and w7 defaults to its radon 4800 drivers. I tried to play bfbc2 and it's ll grainy and choppy.