Seems like the answer to everything is to uninstall and reinstall.
Although it's an answer you frequently hear, I think it's almost
*never* the right answer. This notion stems from the technical support
people at many of the larger OEMs. Their solution to almost any
problem they don't quickly know the answer to is "reformat and
reinstall." That's the perfect solution for them. It gets you off the
phone quickly, it almost always works, and it doesn't require them to
do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't
possess in any great degree).
But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You have to
restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all your
programs, you have to reinstall all the Windows and application
updates,you have to locate and install all the needed drivers for your
system, you have to recustomize Windows and all your apps to work the
way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome, you may
have trouble with some of them: can you find all your application CDs?
Can you find all the needed installation codes? Do you have data
backups to restore? Do you even remember all the customizations and
tweaks you may have installed to make everything work the way you
like? Occasionally there are problems that are so difficult to solve
that Windows should be reinstalled cleanly. But they are few and far
between; reinstallation should not be a substitute for
troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only after all
other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person have failed
Have done
this 6 times since last August.
That's perhaps not so surprising. Since you are reformatting and
reinstalling instead of finding out what's causing the problem, you
are likely repeating the same behavior that causes it each time.
Or if the problem is caused by defective hardware, reformatting and
reinstalling doesn't address it at all.
