Once upon a time, it was considered good practice to reinstall Windows at least once every two years. As Windows has got better at managing itself, however, the need to reinstall on a regular basis has faded, and it’s easy to go 3-5 years between reinstalls. But sooner or later, the inevitable happens. Your hard drive fills up, your desktop starts to become unmanageable and, despite Windows’ best efforts, glitchy behavior and performance start to become disruptive.
While the reinstall process is quick and simple enough (20 minutes on fast hard drives), there’s a lot of work involved in getting things up and running again. In this feature, then, we’ll reveal how to prep your system for the big day, ensuring not only that your data is left untouched by the reinstall process, but that you’re able to port across key program settings and game saves, too.
We’ve focused our attention on Windows 11 for this guide, but the process is practically identical for Windows 10 too. All the tools we’ve sourced to help you are completely free, so reinstalling costs you nothing but your time. Right, enough wrestling with that aging installation. Ready for that factory-fresh feeling? Let’s get moving…
Before taking another step, you need to make a fail-safe backup of your entire Windows system drive as it currently stands. This ensures that no file or setting gets left behind, and also allows you to roll your system back to its previous state if something goes wrong with the reinstall process, whether that’s a mistake during partitioning or you discover that you forgot to back up an important program setting.
You can use your existing drive-imaging tool for this—if you’ve never used one, now’s the time to start: Hasleo Backup Suite () is our current free tool of choice. If you’ve been backing up diligently, take one last full backup and verify it before continuing—Hasleo users will find the verify option under Tools, where you should also click the ‘Emergency Disk’ option to create an emergency USB boot disk or to generate an ISO file
