Quick reformatting advice needed..

[SerraYX]

Well, I've been getting terrible performance out of my GeForce4 lately and figured it's time for a reformat.

My question is whether I'll need to reinstall everything, or just certain programs. I divided my hard drive into a small partition for Windows XP and one for general program space. If I just format and install on the XP drive again, will I need to reinstall games and such? In the past I remember some things didn't work and some things did.. but I'm unsure about now.

 

[Krye]

You will need to reinstall if the program does any kind of integration with windows or if the program requires to be inserted into the registry.

For example...
MS Office, Norton Anti-virus, etc will need to be reinstalled
Most games won't, shareware won't

However, you'll have to recreate most of your shortcuts for anything you don't reinstall. Minor annoyance I'm sure.

 

[ShowdOWN]

i cant stress this enough, get yourself a copy of norton ghost. it will save you headaches that you never knew you even had.

reinstalling your OS and all the software next time will take less then 10 min.