It’s a fact of life that the more you use your PC the more bloated and inefficient it becomes until eventually it gets to the point where you just can’t put up with it any longer.

Sure there are lots of things you can do to hold back the eventual slowing up and general sluggishness of your trusty PC.

Obviously you should have a good anti-virus program installed and a firewall to protect you from online nastiness. It’s also a good idea to run a decent spyware removal program such as Spybot Search & Destroy together with an adware removal tool like Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware. But even with all of these measures in place, eventually you’ll reach a point where your PC just isn’t as snappy as it used to be or worse, it keeps crashing, freezing or alerting you to missing or corrupted DLL files.

At this point you’ve got a couple of options open to you.

Reinstalling Windows

If you know a little about PCs, you can do a full reinstall of your Windows operating system. If you know what you are doing, this is all pretty straightforward, but for a novice there are lots of potential pitfalls along the way.

1. You’ll need to ensure that all of your precious data is properly backed up, then check to confirm that you can actually retrieve your backed up data just to make sure. It does happen you know!
2. You’ll need to note all of your license keys, and backup all of your email, contacts, passwords, etc.
3. When it comes time to reinstall Windows, you’ll have to download and apply all of the updates, then reinstall all of your programs, email and data. It’s a pretty long drawn out and tedious process when you think about it.

If you’re like an awful lot of people who don’t know a lot about PCs or just aren’t confident enough to mess about with their operating system, you’ll be looking for help from a knowledgeable friend or family member or down the route of contacting a Computer Technician to help you out which can be pretty damn expensive!

So, what can be done?

There is another option available which has steadily been growing its capabilities since its inception in 2007.

An Alternative to Reinstalling Windows

Reimage is an online software tool that claims to be able to completely ‘reset’ your PC to a ‘just like new’ state without requiring a full reinstall of Windows and without affecting any of your data, programs or settings – pretty interesting, huh?

It works by installing fresh Windows system files where required which it downloads from an online storage repository.

The Reimage program will identify any resident viruses and malware and completely remove these from your PC during the ‘healing’ process correcting any damage done to your operating system along the way.

What’s more, your data and applications will remain safe and untouched!

It only works for Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 operating systems at present, and it claims to repair your PC to ‘like new’ status in around 1 hour or less.

So, does this program really work and is it as easy as they say it is on the Reimage website? The only real way to find out is to try it yourself so that’s exactly what I did.

A Real-World Test of ReImage

I have a PC that’s 5 or 6 years old that I upgraded to Windows 7 not long after it was first released. It had gotten to the point where I had decided it was time to do a complete reinstall of Windows but I’d been reading various reviews of the Reimage program – some good, some not so good.

I liked what I read on their website and noticed that a lot of the reviews were quite old. I’m a firm believer in trying things out for myself before passing judgement so I went back over to Reimage’s website and performed their ‘free scan’ on my PC.

Well, the scan took about 5 minutes to complete and gave me a detailed report that included all the things it had found wrong with my PC, recent crashes and viruses and malware. It didn’t find any of these which is good as I’m running Norton Internet Security 2011.

It also informed me of where it thought my PC hardware was lacking such as lack of memory and hard disk drive space. All looked very encouraging and professional so I obtained and entered my Reimage license key.

Well I have to say all worked like a dream with no problems whatsoever.

A window remains on-screen during the process displaying a running dialog of what Reimage is currently up to at every stage of its process. There’s a more detailed ‘current processes’ ticker along the bottom strip of the dialog window. It took around 50 – 60 minutes to ‘fix’ my PC and there were no hiccups or problems of any sort along the way.

At last you are asked to reboot your PC which I did with slight apprehension. But, all came up again with a report of what Reimage had done and it gave me the option to Undo if needed as well as a link to pointers to help keep my PC in good health from now on.

The first thing I did was to make sure my email and internet connection was still working and after confirming all was ok I tried out a few of my most used programs such as Word, Excel and Photoshop. Everything appeared to be working just like it should again.

It’s only been a few days since I completed this but all in all it seems to have worked and in a lot shorter time then doing a full reinstall of Windows or taking it to a Computer Tech to be fixed.

Obviously this is just my own personal experience on one PC, I’m sure it won’t fix them all, but Reimage does offer a 30 day money back guarantee. I, for one, will certainly be using Reimage again the next time one of my PCs or laptops looks like needing Windows reloading again. It’s just so much easier and quicker!

Colin Garden is a Hardware Electronics Design Engineer and has been involved in the electronics industry for over 25 years. He is also the owner of www.pc-tips-and-tricks.com which was created to help home PC owners build, maintain and network their own PCs. For more information about my experiences with Reimage together with screenshots of the Reimage program in action take a look at this Reimage review.

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