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You have to impose order yourself, by reinstalling from scratch when Windows starts to disintegrate.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Why you have to reinstall Windows from scratch


Aug. 13, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   When I recommend "emergency surgery" to Windows users, I tell them to reinstall Windows.
   This is bad enough. But I always make matters worse. I tell them to do it the hard way, by reinstalling Windows from scratch.
   For millions of users, reinstalling Windows from scratch every now and then is a fact of life. Microsoft designed Windows this way. In most cases, Windows can't be fixed on the run. Except in rare situations, you can't just boot up into Windows and run the Windows setup program to get Windows to fix things by installing its files on top of the ones you already have. The only time this kind of lazy fix works is when Windows is only slightly damaged, and this usually doesn't even call for a reinstallation anyway.
   This is serious stuff. Reinstalling Windows from scratch means wiping everything out and starting over. It's the Windows equivalent of a brain and heart transplant all at once. It's like falling in love all over again or, perhaps more apt, falling in the pit one more time.
   When you do a complete reinstallation, you wipe out every last shred of sanity on your hard drive and start all over again. Everything goes away.
   So the first thing to understand is the utter totality of it all. Since reinstalling from scratch means losing everything stored on your computer, you have to save your own files before you reinstall Windows. You can do this any way you want (my choice: copy things onto a second hard drive), but save yourself a lot of trouble by copying only your own files.
   You have to reinstall programs from their original installation files (or from their CDs) anyway, so don't save program folders. Just save documents and personal items such as passwords. (Write them down on paper.)
   When all you do is run the setup program while Windows is running and hope that it fixes things, the Windows setup program does something that seems to make sense. It replaces bad or missing operating system files with good ones.
   But the problems you're having with Windows probably aren't caused by bad or missing system files. It doesn't hurt to get the old ones replaced, but it usually doesn't help much either. The problem is more likely to be caused by bad files that are shared by programs. These include the infamous "DLL" files that Windows itself warns you about when they are messed up. (The term means "dynamically linked library.")
   Let's suppose Program A damages a file used by Program B. You get an error when you try to run Program B. Or maybe you get multiple errors. Windows stops working right, so you reinstall it the easy way -- on top of itself.
   When the Windows setup program runs in this scenario, it replaces its own files just fine. But we already know that the problem isn't caused by Windows files. It's caused by something that Program B needed that was shot full of holes by Program A. (Other programs probably needed that file, too, so typically the problem shows up in many ways.)
   So you go through all the trouble of reinstalling Windows and discover that nothing gets fixed.
   Programs often share files in Windows. Rather than expect every programmer to recreate some of the basic functions of Windows, Microsoft encouraged programmers to share common "libraries" of instructions.
   This is a fine idea in an operating system such as Linux, which does not allow programs (or careless users) to destroy files belonging to programs or to the operating system itself. But it spells trouble in Windows, which has no way to keep order.
   And that's why you have to impose order yourself, by reinstalling from scratch when Windows starts to disintegrate.
   Is there an easier way to do this? Not really. Reinstalling is reinstalling. But next week I'll explain how you can create a very fast backup-and-restore system that will do the next best thing to reinstalling Windows. Stay tuned.