should I really reformat and reinstall windows?

[weshuang]

I have a computer that, after an upgrade, has been acting up. And frankly, I think that the Huang household IT dept is not up to the task of troubleshooting .

Anyway, I mostly use the computer to play games. I have had the same OS for 5 years or so, and of course have installed and uninstalled dozens of games during that time. However, I have a bunch of stuff on my drives, including patches and new drivers, etc., that would be a headache to try to remember to re-install or even identify.

Do people really do complete format and re-installs every so often? The thought of a clean system is appealing, but the tought of re-living the troubles I had when upgrading the vid card or adding dsl (!!) cause my stomach to churn.

 

[Shmorq]

Copy your drivers to a separate partitino or copy them to a CD. If you can't do either of those, it'll be a headache doing a format/reinstall.

What I do is use Norton Ghost to take an image of my hard drive after everything is setup the way I like it. And if something goes wrong, or I wanna return to a previous setting, I just have to overwrite the hard drive with my image file.

 

[weshuang]

When you say copy the drivers, do you mean the various driver update files I've downloaded over time, or do you mean to actually go in and make copies of the files in the windows folder that are identified in device manager? As I'm typing it, it seems like a naive question, but let's face it, I'm in over my head here, so I may as well ask away.

I assume that copying the existing files in my windows directory may only recreate the problem if I have corrupted files somewhere. On the other hand, I really am unsure that I can easily identify the driver updates that I've downloaded and collected over time. Maybe the easiest thing is just to use the system drivers for everything, then go get updates on the web for each one.

Anyway, sounds like you are suggesting that I really should reformat, huh? This is not going to be fun.

>>Copy your drivers to a separate partitino or copy them to a CD. If you can't do either of those, it'll be a headache doing a format/reinstall.<<

 

[Shmorq]

I wouldn't try looking for the drivers in the Windows System folders...
What you should do before reformatting is download all the newest drivers right now, save them somewhere safe, and then reformat and reinstall. At least you'll be getting the latest driver updates this way...

By the way, I don't know how to backup the windows update files so you might have to go to microsoft to re-download all the patches and stuff for windows.