Windows reinstall

Nick Peers reveals how to give your PC the ultimate shot in the arm

If you only have one drive, partition it to keep data separate.

© MICROSOFT

Once upon a time, it was considered good practice to reinstall Windows at least once every two years. As Windows has got better at managing itself, however, the need to reinstall on a regular basis has faded, and it’s easy to go 3-5 years between reinstalls. But sooner or later, the inevitable happens. Your hard drive fills up, your desktop starts to become unmanageable and, despite Windows’ best efforts, glitchy behavior and performance start to become disruptive.

While the reinstall process is quick and simple enough (20 minutes on fast hard drives), there’s a lot of work involved in getting things up and running again. In this feature, then, we’ll reveal how to prep your system for the big day, ensuring not only that your data is left untouched by the reinstall process, but that you’re able to port across key program settings and game saves, too.

We’ve focused our attention on Windows 11 for this guide, but the process is practically identical for Windows 10 too. All the tools we’ve sourced to help you are completely free, so reinstalling costs you nothing but your time. Right, enough wrestling with that aging installation. Ready for that factory-fresh feeling? Let’s get moving…

Before taking another step, you need to make a fail-safe backup of your entire Windows system drive as it currently stands. This ensures that no file or setting gets left behind, and also allows you to roll your system back to its previous state if something goes wrong with the reinstall process, whether that’s a mistake during partitioning or you discover that you forgot to back up an important program setting.

You can use your existing driveimaging tool for this—if you’ve never used one, now’s the time to start: Hasleo Backup Suite (www.easyuefi.com) is our current free tool of choice. If you’ve been backing up diligently, take one last full backup and verify it before continuing— Hasleo users will find the verify option under Tools, where you should also click the ‘Emergency Disk’ option to create an emergency USB boot disk or to generate an ISO file for burning to DVD (or adding to your Ventoy USB bootable disk).

AUDIT YOUR PC

With your fail-safe backup and emergency boot disk in place, you can now move on to see what’s currently installed on your PC. You can either visit Settings > System > Installed Apps to comb through the list manually, or download Free PC Audit (www. misutilities.com/download.html ), a portable tool that produces the same list under its Software tab, but allows you to produce a text file—copy and paste the Software section into its own blank file, then trim the list so that it includes only those programs you plan to bring forward to your new Windows installation.

Don’t reinstall without a fail-safe drive image.

Some software may be difficult to identify—it may be a component of some other application, for example—but the key thing is to list those programs you use regularly and would like to try to preserve your current settings for if possible. Once the list is made, bring together the program installers into a single folder to speed things up post-installation (and identify any that may prove problematic to track down, such as older paid versions of software that is no longer supported). You should also check those that require online activation—you may need to deactivate them prior to reinstalling for a trouble-free reinstall later. Check the program’s help or online support if you’re not sure.

Take an inventory of your apps to decide which ones to keep.

© MICROSOFT

Also, make a note of any product keys you may need to enter post-reinstall—if you’re struggling to track them down,check your email or software packaging, or log into your account to see if the keys are listed there. Also check in case the key’s displayed in the program itself (look under About), or try a key finding tool, such as Recover Keys ($29.95, https:// recover-keys.com/). This offers a free demo, allowing you to see which apps it has found license keys and other related information (such as activation codes) for. The demo reveals the first four characters of the keys it finds, which may be enough to help you track the rest of the key down without incurring an extra cost—for example, try searching your computer or email messages for those four characters to see if they subsequently show up.