Tips for maintaining your environment over a OS reinstall? [closed]

"Each time you reinstall, it's a chance to start afresh and reconfigure stuff differently, albeit the small details like the start menu. Some stuff is really hard to get right, as you said, like games configurations and licenses and so forth.

If you really need to reinstall quite often and use the exact same settings, that's called ""restoring a backup."" Clone your hard disk once a week and keep your daily data backed up as well. If you need to restore, you've got your config -- one week old at most -- and your data (fresh).

HDs are so cheap now that you can even keep one monthly and one yearly backup happening.

I've used programs like HDClone on Windows or SuperDuper on OSX even to move from one physical computer to another, or from one HD to another. Reinstalling the OS is a different problem. If you're reinstalling the OS a lot, there are a lot of programs to backup your Windows settings (including Windows own ""Files and Settings Transfer Wizard"")...

But really, do you need to reinstall that often?"