Revitalising VISTA Home Edition
 

Hopefully someone can help on this. My computer with Vista is going really slow and crashes often when a file or icon is clicked. It never did seem fast on Vista, and eventually I will put XP back in when the kids school holidays come around in a few weeks.

If I put the program CD in, when it repairs, will that lose the vast number of updates that Microsoft have downloaded? Will I need to reload previous programs? I could just try it out, but with school projects and whatever still being worked on, that might end up bad.

Alternately, is there a way of saving the updates, and many MS added programs I see on opening the control panel in 'programs and features'?

If you haven't got it already, download CC Cleaner and use it to clear out the crud on the disk and then use it to clean up the registry to see if that helps the Vista problems.

If you have a large enough Hard Drive why not install XP as a dual boot system? You'll need to partition it first though

Good advice that is. I would always try a clean up before pressing the nuclear button.

One thing I do here is once I have an absolute cast iron build, I take a disk image of it with Acronis & keep that file off the pc. That way if anything blows, I have a working rebuild to hand & can avoid the pain of a rebuild from scratch.

Yes - it will overwrite any files that have been downloaded via updates with the older originals from the disk.
Not if you do a repair, but yes if you do a new installation.

Whatever you do, backup all data first. And downtime is worse than slowtime, as you rightly point out!

SD

Thanks for the advice. I downloaded and used CC Cleaner. So far things seem good, certainly a lot of files were removed. Only worry now is I pressed the download for SP2, as I am used to getting daily updates for Vista. Maybe I will regret that.