Lets face it, computers can be finicky, and worse yet they can get viruses or just seem to explode for no reason. This tutorial will help you secure your Operating System so that you never have to sit in front of your computer screen re-installing everything ever again. You will need the following items.

1 USB external hard drive (at least 20GB but 150-500GB is better) or a second hard drive with similar amounts of free space
1 CD-ROM record able or RW
Internet access


Got that stuff? Great lets get started.

The biggest pain in the ass for reinstalling everything is that you have to find all your programs again, and all the drivers and such... it take forever because you spend 2 hours installing windows, 30 minutes installing drivers, 2 hours tweaking stuff, and another 2 hours putting all your programs on, plus some infinite amount of time downloading shit from steam.

Step 1: Get PING (http://ping.windowsdream.com)

PING is a Ghost like program that will allow you to make an image of your hard drive. An image is great because it effectively take a picture of all the 1's and 0's on your HD and stores them as a file so you can restore an entire OS and its drivers and such immediately.

Step 2: Burn the iso you Downloaded to a CD

Step 3: Clean up and clear your setup
Take some time now to uninstall every program on your PC that you do not use. Also move all your files and documents to the second or external HD. We want to clean up your C: as much as possible to get the total used space down low. Get all your cluttered icons off the desktop as well.

Step 4: have a sandwich
This is hard work after all

Step 5: Backup you steam games.
Right click on any steam game you want to install quickly from your list and choose the backup option. You will tell steam to back it up DVD Style to the external or second HD. Steam will create a folder with an install program. Once you've backed up your games make sure that you make copies of all your sprays and configs for each game. Delete Steam and everything in its folders.... this will free up an enormous amount of space.

Step 6: Put the PING disc in your CD/DVD tray and reboot your computer.

Step 7: Boot the disc, if the PING O/S does not start automaticaly then reboot the pc and enter the bios to make the cd/DVD bootable.

Step 8: Follow the instructions on the PING website (http://ping.windowsdream.com/ping/doc-2.01/using.html)

The program will now back up everything to the hard drive you chose. Once its done you can reboot the PC and remove the disk getting back to windows. Now if your computer ever tanks on you then you can pop the PING disc into the CD/DVD and use the restore function to overwrite your HD and restore windows with all its drivers. You can even do this on a brand new HD if the first one went bad. And since you've got your steam games backed up as well it only takes you 20 minutes to restore them and put you CFG's and sprays back. How's that for genius?

For you advanced folks who hate having your second or external drive full of data that just sits there you can burn your steam backups to discs, and the PING website has a tutorial to burn the image it wrote to DVD (may take 5 or 6 discs). This will let you have a physical copy you can hold on to, and free up some space.

Now be aware that if you have made some significant hardware changes the "fresh" install may not like it, but if you keep your discs for that hardware handy, things should be ok. I recommend though that anytime you make a drastic hardware change you re-install windows so that all the drivers are better integrated, with minimal leftover garbage.