The comp has now, twice, failed to start up in less than three days. Both times it has worked fine in the morning, but blue-sceen-of-deathed (so briefly I don’t have time to see what it says) and then run a reset to an earlier, working date on starting. Both times I’ve also gotten a message that the anti-virus isn’t up to date (Microsoft Security Essentials) but I think that is because it resets to an earlier time.
Anyway. I was looking for instructions on how to reformat Windows 7 on Microsoft’s site and I THINK this is it; “Reinstalling Windows 7” (reading from the Swedish version). It sounds about right in the instructions. Since I’m a bitt winded up about the whole thing I’m not going to do something before I know this is it, so I’ll just ask to be on the safe side: Will this accomplish the same as a reformat?
I’ve been running both Spybot and the anti-virus, and neither of them find anything.
I really, REALLY hope this will end these goddamn problems.
A reinstall will not accomplish the same as a reformat. You’ll want to follow the Using the Custom installation option and formatting the hard disk instructions. Do make sure you backup everything of personal importance - documents, pictures, favourites, save games, e-mails, etc.
Have you checked if it’s a ram problem? I had a similar problem when I built my computer and played Starcraft 2 on it. I didn’t know at the time that there was a bug in the game that could potentially fry the ram. One of my modules was broken and whenever I started up with two sticks it would bsod on startup. Sometimes it would boot fine but when I ran a program it would crash and restart. Safe mode sometimes worked. Whenever I could get an error report it would say some kind of system file was corrupted and in turn corrupted krnl.exe or something like that. I RMA’d the ram and that did the trick.
Hm, dunno. The only game I had on the computer before was Civilization 5, and I haven’t reinstalled that. I had that for months before the problems started and hadn’t played it in a while, though. I’m going to get Rift this or next week, probably, we’ll see how that works out.
When reinstalling an OS doesn’t it ask if you would like to delete/replace existing partitions? and by doing so… isn’t that kind of the same as reformatting?
Perhaps this is just with windows XP… however I’m curious! Nice question btw Weiila.
If you tell it to delete and replace existing partitions, it’s a format and not a reinstall. It would be semantics if a reinstall didn’t entail merely overwriting the system files with the original install system files. It’d leave all your personal data intact ( as well as any viruses not amongst the overwritten system files. )
