help to fix fatherinlaws pc

[Chris]

Hi
My father-in-law has a newish PC which is suffering from problems that
seemed to result from when someone else migrated across alot of his old
programs/files from his old pc. He tries to do work on it now but gets lots
of errors and crashes etc.

Now, he doesnt want to do a reformat of C drive/reinstall of windows just
yet, until he can get someone to remove everything that he needs keeping
(which is a lot)
So i've told him, a quick fix so he can get on with his work maybe to
install a new harddrive, install a seperate operating system on it, then
boot up from that second hardrive/OS and install only the programs he needs
for work on there.

Would this work?

Many thanks for any help

 

[Clark]

For me it is always good to start with a clean hard drive. To do that, you
can do a couple of things. One being to backup the old drive in a way you
can restore certain items when you find you need them (I use Norton Ghost).
The other is to use a new hard drive and set up the operating system on it.
AFTER you have loaded the system and have it running, you could install the
old hard drive as a slave drive and take things off it as needed. If you
have the old computer, you might just network it and take things off that
way.

It is easy to reinstall the basic programs. It is not so easy to recreate
you data files and information files and all the things you have on the
drive you may have forgotten about. Of course, some of the older programs
may have problems with newer operating systems.

Clark

 

[DaveW]

If you have a new computer with an OS installed on it, then you cannot
"migrate" programs over to it from another computer. You have to Install
the older programs on the new computer and then you CAN migrate the data
from the older computer.
It's time to seriously realize that it may be necessary to reformat C: and
start over.

 

[Curious George]

also look at Look at "[OT] Things o back up when doing a clean install
of Windows XP" for more/related suggestions.