Help reinstalling vista? A question...

Okay so I did a very small amount of tweaking but I'm sorry I did. I applied some of black viper's tweaks, using mostly his "safe" settings with a few "tweaked" settings for vista 64 home premium.

Restarted the computer and bam... blue screen of death. Took out the internet cable and restarted okay. ran 3dmark with all security switched off and gained a couple hundred marks. Cool right? Well that was with stock drivers so I tried .82. Got about 300-400 marks less. started trying other drivers and then 3dmark06 started freezing and gave me device errors and couldn't complete. Great... so after trying some other drivers and even reloading the stock drivers from disk, 3dmark simply would not complete and was unstable.

So I did a system restore from a backup created the day before, which reset all my service tweaks and then reinstalled the drivers. Okay.. so ran 3dmark, got my previous out of the box scores and everything seemed fine. But every now and then I get a stutter and sometimes 3dmark will work and other times it will freeze so obviously, somewhere along the line I lost some stability.

Bottom Line? I am considering reinstalling vista, but can I reinstall without wiping out my hard drive and 3rd party applications? Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

 

If you do a clean reinstall, all your data and 3rd party applications will be lost. Back up any data, and make sure you have the install files for your 3rd party programs.

 

Unless your 3rd party apps were on a separate partition,the only thing you can do is backup your documents and save game files and format.

 

mmkay. Thanks for the help. One more question... If I install from the disk that came with the laptop, I don't have to uninstall vista first right? It won't double install will it? I did look around on the forums for answers to these questions however I never found anything definitive or straightforward. Thanks again.

 

You don't have to uninstall Vista (however you do that ), just insert the disk and choose to reformat the partition before you install. That way it will be a nice, clean install.

But back up that data first.

 

just a little tips, make sure you format your disk as NTFS

 

Thanks so much!

 

+10char

 

you should also be able to put the disc in and install as a upgrade. this will install a new version of windows but keep everything else on the system then delete the old windows folder??

 

I did that once. It felt bloated afterwards.