Restoring Vista using Windows.old?

[ConraDargo]

Hey everyone!

Yesterday, Alcohol (the application) bummed up my Windows Vista so badly
that I simply had to reinstall everything. Now since I ended up with a
Windows.old folder containing everything from my previous Vista installation,
I was hoping that I could somehow use this to e.g. recover my Sidebar and the
way I had configured how I want Vista to look (you know with font types and
how transparent the windows are etc). But I'm not sure how I do it?

So far I've only copied the User-folder from Windows.old to C: - overwriting
all files that could be overwritten. I hope that was OK to do?
You'd think that the built-in recovery application would be able to take
care of this, but apparently not.

Any and all help is much appreciated. I'd rather not sit here for like an
hour or two while manually trying to get everything back to normal!
Thanks.

 

[ConraDargo]

Hello Brink! Thanks, according to those articles it seems that I CAN in fact
simply copy everything from Windows.old to my new Windows folder. Never
would've guessed (I actually still have a kinda bad feeling about this, but
at least copying everything from my User folder worked like a charm - so now
my Sidebar looks just like it used to!).

I'll be sure to report back later on how things went

 

[ConraDargo]

Well, hmm, things didn't go as smoothly as I would've hoped. Can't say I'm
surprised about it.
Vista doesn't feel quite as stable now as before, and I'm having trouble
getting back my emails into Outlook. I think I'll just have to reinstall
everything again this weekend and only restore the User-folder, leaving
Windows be.

Bleh. I'mma make sure to create backups every now and then now that I've
learned my lesson