Funkii Munkii

My pc is 5 years old now and running pretty slowly

I'm thinking of wiping the hard drive and reinstalling XP

A couple of Q's

I have an external hard drive can I copy everything from the C drive onto the external and then wipe the c drive reinstall XP and copy files back from the xternal drive ??

Any other things I need to consider before doing this, I have disk clean/defragmented etc etc and increased the size of the virtual memory but things are still slow.

Any advice appreciated

Cheers
FM

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

If it's only data you are copying back then yes. Take into account any applications you use will need to be reinstalled, and all your preferences in those apps will need setting again.

This is why it is always best to image your drive when you have everything as you want it and performance is still good, that way, if you do have any issues with the hardware or a nasty virus you can just restore the image.

boxst

Just remember to take everything: Documents, Pictures, Music and things that people forget like Internet Explorer favourites, email files, contacts/address book.

Make sure you have all the applications to re-install and/or the activation keys etc..

Then you can just reformat and re-install.

Steve

Funkii Munkii

Thanks peeps

All data I want to keep(pics/files/music) is on the External HD.

How do I save applications, like DVDsoft, Paint Net etc, these were down loads from the net, not on disc, sorry I'm a dumbass when it comes to these things. All other apps I have dics for and password so shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks again

Funkii Munkii

Thanks Dave, always saved them so shouldn't be an issue finding the location.

I'll give it a go one night this week

Hopefully you wont be reading an "I killed my PC" thread in a few days

hodgy0_2

in future keep all your application downloads in a seperate folder (away from your system drive)

also "redirect" your my documents folder

to do this, create a new folder called data on a seperate drive say D:\data, then right click on "My Documents" select properties, in the target location box point to the d:\data

that way it's all automatic, from appliactions just save to "my Documents" this will save to d:\data which is outside your user profile and of your system drive, so you can format at will

as previously said you can be more sophisticated and move favorites to

also xp has a built in utility to capture you profile settings in "system tools" its called the "file and transfer wizard" -- but your best off with first approach