Originally Posted By: martinfocazio
For most people, older systems, and yes, it's older WINDOWS systems, get flakier and stranger over time, and the answer always seems to be re-install Windows, and the problem with that is it takes a week for things to stabilize after a re-install…


Originally Posted By: haertig
It is rare to get more than two years of performance out of a Windows system without having to reinstall the OS. Not "repair" it ... reinstall it clean from scratch. And it does take a few days to get everything back to normal after that.


There is no need to reinstall and set up everything when your system is corrupted or slow. All it takes is to make images of the system disk or partition at the beginning (after the first Win installation) and before any significant change. Then you can restore the system from those images with all (or a lot of) of your settings (depending how old the image is). You do not have to install and setup single application. There are several free and commercial applications specilaized for this like Seagate DiscWizard (free if you have Seagate hard drive), DriveImage XML (free), Acronis TrueImage (commercial), Norton Ghost (commercial) etc. The commercial sw has some features that might be very important but it depends how your PC is set up.

I havenīt tested the restoring process yet because I have never needed it but I backup system disk images on a regular basis (before any significant change etc.). Iīm using Seagate DiscWizard now. I think full system backup (disk image) is the best solution for OS failures/slowdown.

Maybe if you change hardware components a lot you will have to reinstall system from your Win CD and setup everything again though. I am not sure.