Wiping HD and re-installing software

[Jsingle]

Beacause of my XP computer's slow speed and a suspected virus infection, i
want to reformat my Hard Drive and start over. Is there is way or program
that I can use to save my installed software and their settings ONLY and do a
clean install of WinXP Home.

 

[R. McCarty]

Windows XP provides a built-in facility called "Files and Settings Transfer
Wizard". It can be configured to backup specific data. However, I've found
that it's reliability isn't what it should be. Because you're working with
one
drive you'd have to format before determining if the FAST data store will
work and recover your data. Whenever you backup one important thing is
the backup's reliability. ( Can you use it ). If your data isn't very large
you
might be better off making a simple CD-R/DVD-R backup of the data. The
preferred method is a drive (volume) image of your XP. One good program
for this is Acronis True Image. It provides a Verification pass on backed up
data. Not only does it create a compressed image of the volume it also goes
back and verifies the data is valid/usable. Also you can use the program to
extract specific files and folders. Many times a manual backup may leave
out data that you discover you'll need and didn't backup.

Backups should always be stored ( or copied ) to permanent media, such
as Optical disks. Magnetic storage is subject to loss and corruption.

 

[John John (MVP)]

No, if you cleanly reinstall Windows you will have to reinstall your
software. You can use the File and Settings Transfer Wizard to safe
some of your program settings but that will not restore your programs,
you still need to reinstall the programs.

John

 

[Malke]

Beacause of my XP computer's slow speed and a suspected virus infection, i
want to reformat my Hard Drive and start over. Is there is way or program
that I can use to save my installed software and their settings ONLY and
do a clean install of WinXP Home.

As Mr. McCarty told you, imaging is the best way to go. BUT you don't want
to do this now since your computer is infected and the image would of
course be the same.

So the answer to your question is no, sorry. Bite the bullet, clean-install
Windows, install all your drivers, do the Windows Updates, install the
programs you always will want, set everything up perfectly, and then image
the drive.

To image the drive, buy an imaging program - I like Acronis True Image - and
an external hard drive. You'll store the image on the external drive. Then
the *next* time you need to clean-install Windows you'll just boot with the
rescue media CD you made (from within Acronis) and point the restore
process to the image you stored. Acronis also does incremental backups to
keep your images current. It will only take a little while to restore your
computer back to its pristine state then.

Malke

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Beacause of my XP computer's slow speed and a suspected virus infection, i
want to reformat my Hard Drive and start over.

A poor choice, in my view. The slow speed may be a result of the virus
infection, and your first effort should be to remove the virus
infection.

Moreover, doing a clean reinstallation rather than finding out what is
wrong and fixing it makes it likely that you will repeat the behavior
that caused the problem and quickly find yourself back where you
started. It's one of the main reasons I am almost always against doing
a clean reinstallation instead of troubleshooting to fix a problem.

Is there is way or program
that I can use to save my installed software and their settings ONLY and do a
clean install of WinXP Home.

No. Another reason I'm against doing what you plan to do is that it's
a great deal of work.

 

[Daave]

Beacause of my XP computer's slow speed and a suspected virus
infection, i
want to reformat my Hard Drive and start over.

It would probably be easier and quicker to tell us the symptoms in
detail as well as the specs of your PC and just learn how to deal with
your particular problem. It's true there are some instances when a clean
install is necessary, but you haven't provided enough information to
reach this conclusion.

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

No.