I can reinstall W7 and keep my documents, correct?

Azureth

Azureth

Supreme [H]ardness
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My computer has been having issues with installing updates, it is my older comp since I broke my new one and I had two HDDs one for OS/apps/misc stuff, and the other just for games, well, since I was using my new comp I had formatted my games HDD which seemed to have messed up my windows updates because when I install and reboot it stays stuck at 8% forever and I have to reboot where it boots up normally but it obviously hasnt installed them. So I figure a reinstall of windows may help. Thing is I have lots of files/folders in my documents, can I just reinstall windows but keep everything else?
 
You can do a Windows Repair install (or whavetever it's called now), and that will reinstall windows, but should not touch your data files. I don't recall exactly about programs, but IIRC, programs are left untouched. Any customization of settings will be reset back to Windows default though.

Have you tried booting into safe mode, doing a system recovery to a point before the update(s), then re-downloading the update/installing? Or manually downloading the package(s) trying to install which are getting stuck? Just one option.
 
If you dont make a backup you are asking for trouble, whether during a windows install or at any time after.
 
This is exactly the kind of scenario why many people partition their harddrives into OS and data partitions. If the OS gets porked you're always left with the option of a quick format and clean install.

If you host your documents in the OS drive you're going to have to hunt and copy them to an external drive before reinstall - or do a repair install and hope it works.

But as said a repair install will not damage your profile or files in it. Sometimes a repair is not enough in which case you can simply reinstall Windows on top of the old one, but it will pork every badly made software you may have (that has stored stuff in Windows registry, unfortunately that's almost every software you can think of). This means that you'll need to reinstall them all after doing the install as it purges your registry.

I just have to wonder who was the smart guy who made storing program settings into Windows registry a part of 'best practices'. I wonder how many millions of wasted man hours and electricity have been spent as a direct result of fixing that mess.

Everything would be so much simplier if programs would just be self sufficient so that you just need to copy the file folder after reinstall and the software will work. File associations etc. stuff can be remade on first run if need be.
 
B00nie said:
I just have to wonder who was the smart guy who made storing program settings into Windows registry a part of 'best practices'. I wonder how many millions of wasted man hours and electricity have been spent as a direct result of fixing that mess.

Everything would be so much simplier if programs would just be self sufficient so that you just need to copy the file folder after reinstall and the software will work. File associations etc. stuff can be remade on first run if need be.
Click to expand...

Software vendors would not like to make it as easy to copy software to multiple machines like it used to be in DOS.
 
drescherjm said:
Software vendors would not like to make it as easy to copy software to multiple machines like it used to be in DOS.
Click to expand...

For copiers it makes no difference if they run the installer or just copy the folder. For reinstallers it makes all the difference as they already have the folder with no need to copy.
 
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