My ol puter is going on 3 years old now and I've been having a lot of strange little glitches, "serious errors" and whatnot lately and I think the registry has about had it. I want to do a format, start from scratch. The problem is last time I did this it took quite a while to get back up to speed.

Anything you'd recommend to make this less painful? I won't have antivirus or firewall when I do this as I no longer have the Norton disk I installed with, and whatnot. Recommend I download a bunch of crap and put it all on a usb drive for a quick install?

Suggestions? =)

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Burn a CD of the install files you want (Norton, Drivers, etc) before you format, and back up your documents, then reinstall?

Get another hard drive, install the OS and boot on the new hard drive from now on.

If you need anything from the first hard drive it's still there and bootable in case.

How would that work? I thought everything goes on the registry anyhow, so with a format you'd still have to reinstall all the old proggies?

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

He's just talking about being able to access old things, you wouldn't be able to run a few programs from the other drive I'm sure. You'd be able to save things though.

He's just talking about being able to access old things, you wouldn't be able to run a few programs from the other drive I'm sure. You'd be able to save things though.

Once you installed something, you could copy it back over and I think it'd retain your old settings. I do this when I reinstall Windows, I copy World of Warcraft to a spare drive, then move it back when I reinstall. Better than reinstalling WoW every time.

Just toss in an XP cd, boot to the install, when it gets to the point that is asks you if you want to do a fresh install of windows or repair the current install, do the repair. You will have to reinstall a few things, but everything will still be there.

Or do as Fin said, buy a new HDD and just boot to it.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.