What you need: Hasleo Backup Suite Free; CloneApp Time required: Two hours
It was once considered good practice to reinstall Windows roughly every two years. The system is now much better at managing itself so you don’t need to reinstall so often. Sooner or later, though, the inevitable happens: your hard drive fills up, your desktop becomes less responsive and your PC suffers numerous glitches that make it unusable.
Reinstalling Windows wipes the slate clean, so you can start again with a fast, fresh computer. It’s simple and takes only around 20 minutes with a fast hard drive, but there can be lot of work involved in getting your PC running again. We’ll explain how to make sure your data and program settings are safely preserved and available after reinstallation.
We’ve focused our attention on Windows 11 for this guide, but the process is more or less the same for Windows 10. Before you take another step, however, make a backup of your entire Windows system drive. You can use any drive-imaging tool for this – if you’ve never used one, now is the perfect time to start. Hasleo Backup Suite (www.easyuefi.com, pictured right) is our current free tool of choice.
If you’ve been backing up diligently, make one last full backup and verify it before continuing – you’ll find the verifyoption under Tools. You should also click the Emergency Disk option to create an emergency USB boot disk or generate an ISO file that you can burn to DVD.
