I have a client who is having big problems with her computer at the moment. Turning it on is a bit like Russian Roulette - sometimes is works without a hitch, other times is refuses to start properly.

While it might be possible to track down the cause for this "interesting" problem it will be much easier to bite the bullet and re-install Windows. That way she will end up with a computer that is as it was when she first bought it, a pristine installation of Windows and lots and lots of nice empty space on her hard drive.

And therein lies the problem (as you might have noticed).

The downside with reinstalling Windows, is that you loose everything you have saved on the hard drive. That’s all your documents, pictures and music. All the programs you’ve installed will disappear - though that’s not always bad as everyone has some programs they installed to try out and never used them again. Even your desktop and favourites will revert back to the standard Windows version.

Don’t worry all is not lost if you do three tasks. Ideally you should be doing these all the time but, as long as the computer will start, you can get away with doing them before reinstalling Windows.

Firstly, back up all your documents, pictures, music; everything you have saved, value or worked on. It is possible to save these onto CDs or DVDs but you can soon run into space problems. It can therefore be better to use an external hard drive which just plugs into a USB socket, is a lot cheaper than using CD/DVDs and is a lot quicker to copy your files over.

Secondly, make sure you keep the disks or downloads you used to install the programs you use regularly in a safe place. Don’t forget to keep any serial numbers, login details or other such codes somewhere you can find them. With some programs (Google Earth for example) you will be able to download the latest version though if your computer is getting on a bit you might prefer to stay with an older version. Try [1] www.oldversion.com where there is a huge library of such older versions.

Finally, it is a simple task to save both the Desktop settings and the Favourites from Internet Explorer. Both are stored in the same place but it varies between XP and Vista.

XP users need to look in C:\Documents and Settings\Users name while Vista users should look in C:\Users\Users name. In both cases once you get to the folder you’ll see two folders called "Desktop" and "Favourites" respectively. Just copy those to your external drive or where ever you’re backing up to.

Once Windows has been re-installed all you need to do is re-install your other programs and copy the backup files into the same place they originally were. That is "Desktop" to "Desktop", "Documents" to "Documents" etc. Don’t forget, there will be folders with the same name already there so your computer will ask if you want to replace these with the ones you’re copying from your backup source. Its just being captious so say yes to replacing.

The entire job isn’t hard just takes time, allow at least a day from start to finish.