There comes a day when your commputer is struggling to open even Solitaire, and you will be faced with the horrible reality that you have to reinstall Windows. After numerous streams of profanity, you set off to do it. There are two major reasons why no one like to reinstall Windows. First, you have to reinstall all your programs as well. Second, you have to format your drive which means you will lose all your documents, bootleg movies and stolen mp3s.

There still is no solution for the first problem, so I’ll try to help you with the second. There are at least four ways to go about reinstalling Windows without losing all your data.

1. You can burn all your documents onto 500 or so CDs or DVDs. This I don’t recommend.
2. The easiest way I think is to install a second hard drive and transfer anything you want to keep onto it. Then format and reinstall on the main harddrive.
3. Another easy way, without a second harddrive, is to partition your harddrive. Then transfer all your data to the partition and format and reinstall on the main partition.
4. There is another process that I have not tried yet. You can reinstall windows without partitions or second hard drives. The process seems a little tougher than the above two but might be worth a try.

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