Too lazy to find my windows disc right now, and truthfully may not use it.

Anyways, I want to reinstall windows, but keep most of my old media. Why? It's crashing like crazy (explorer and the like) for some odd reason now. So can I keep my media on the same disc I'm installing to or would I have to reformat before the install?

If you want to start with a fresh install of windows, it is completely possible to do so without formatting. Just choose an alternate installation directory during the install. If you install into the same directory, it will do an upgrade, keeping all your current settings and programs (which you probably don't want).

What version of Windows are you using now? What version are you planning to install?

Okay:

Drive C:\ (20 gigs, about 700mb free). Running a faulty version os 98se on it that seems to be lately very crash happy (esp. with explorer and the like). However this is the drive that all the stuff I want to clean out is on, however with all the media as well.
Drive D:\ (3 gigs, 83mb free). Running windows XP, but as I don't like XP (lack of morrowind and bad installations to this small drive), I don't want to rely on it on the top of my list.


I really don't know what caused all of the crashing, my sister ran word one day and then a lot of stuff started to crash.

If you want to start afresh, I would personally recommend getting a new hard drive. They really aren't expensive, and they are really big (the smallest you can get now is 80GB). That way you can have a brand new install of Windows and still keep all your old files with a minimum of fuss.

Otherwise the only option would be to clean out your hard drives manually. A good rule for deleting things is "Has it been used within the last month?" - if not you probably don't need it.

Windows XP is a better OS than Windows 98 - that's a fact, not my personal opinion. Unless you have severe software or hardware incompatibilities with it, you should use it as your prominent OS. I know that you have personally had problems with it in the past, but maybe if you did a clean install on a clean hard drive it might work better for you.

Is it possible that a virus (activated from a bad Word document) is causing the crashing? You should do a complete virus scan with updated definitions. What version of Office is it?

Office XP. and I think I've solved the problem, but going to stay away from office for a while.

Apparently I left a defrag running, but cancelled it halfway through. This isn't healthy or so the 100% processor usage spikes (2 sec) would indicate. I also found a temporary solution in doing several full scandisks (Scandisk (98se) pwns chkdsk(XP) ;p) and deleting a lot of stuff (still want a new HDD though, but not allowed to buy one). So I'll redo the defragmentation, but for now the system works okay.

And reasons for not using XP:
- Uses more memory on a few of the useless things.
- Didn't layer program installs (IE both systems having the same programs folder to save space)
- Horrible recovery rate after a system failure.
- Horrible Suicidal rate causing system failures.
- It doesn't run Safedisc protected games (IE morrowind) >\.

Weee, fix0red!