Hi all, My daughters computer is not running well a lot of programs have trouble opening or working.At first I tried to burn all info on CD's but for some reason niothing is on the CD despite Nero says everything is ok. I've tried to copy the data in order to do a complete reformat and do a clean install. My question is, can I overwrite Windows an not loose data? TIA Tamtam

If you do an "over the top" reinstall, you shouldn't lose any data or programs, but it's recommended to backup just in case. I believe you'll lose all Windows Updates so they will have to be reinstalled. Have you checked for the obvious such as viruses, spyware, unnecessary programs loading at startup, fragmented HDD, etc? "And that's the fishing line, because Sharkboy said so!"

Jam, I did the obvious scanned online for virusses as the virusprogram and firewall is deleted by my son in law because they didn't worked well anymore. That me me suspicious too but neither scans or Hijack This log shows anything unusual Ofcourse can't run an antirootkit on W98 All startupitem that are unecessary are disable in order to fragment and scan HDD easily. There is a problem with Java and am not able to solve it. Despite I installed and uninstalled the exact version for W98 several times, looked for similar problem at Java's faq's I don't find the reason why a lot of programs say I need to install Java and it's on the computer. I also did a sfc and came up with several dll that are corrupt or missing. replacement or reair was not possible. Because of all those problems I wanted to format and do a clean Windows install but am not able to copy all data so hoped with overwriting Windows it would work all better. So I'm out of arrows so far Tamtam

You might check my #5 here: http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... where I described that. It's important to install windows in the same directory you're using now. I said there to have it install in c:\windows because that's the default on a fresh installation, But if you've done reinstalls before you may be using a different directory. The easiest way to check may be to open an msdos window. If the prompt shows c:\windows> then it's in the default windows dirctory. If it shows c:\windows.000> then it's in a windows.000 directory. In any case just have the new install be in whatever your current directory is. You can boot with the 98 cd and not necessarily the bootdisk. Just rename win.com before doing the install. And with the cd you won't have to specify the cdrom drive--just type setup and enter to start the setup. (In many cases you can do that with the bootdisk too, it just depends on how it's set up.)