Hello all, i would like to reformat my laptop due to numerous downloads and subsequent slowdowns;

whats the best way to save dcs and reinitialize?

i have all of the original cds that came with laptop.

I would back off everything you want to save.

Documents, cookies, mails, address books, bookmarks, etc.

Then I would use the restore disk to bring it back to factory new. Refomatting would work if you had all the drivers you needed for the laptop too, but if you restore it with the restore CD it will put those on it for you.

Run all the windows updates, then import the cookies, bookmarks, etc.

You may also need to update the drivers from the manufacturers web site for best performance, often they are going to be newer than the ones that the restore CD installs.

This is sometimes power and other manufacturer specific stuff (Dell is good example) like wireless utilities need updates.

thanks for the tip guys, i ll try that tomorrow after work..,

a,

The real troubel comes wiht finding all the locatiosn thatyour data is squirrleled away.....
For safety take a Drive Image of the hard drive (assumign you have everythign on one partition - C you will need to create a seperate partition of have a connected drive to burn this image to)
Then you can always get back to your data

Then - if youw ant ot make this process easy for future - create a second partition - D for data, restore your CD install to C and then restore your backed up data per the other suggestions and point all your data sources to D - that makes back up easy for future.
Then take regular sdrive images of yoru system so you can restore back to this point if you ever run into trouble. All the while backin up yoru D data drive to keep yrou data safe