Hello again everyone, I'm back. Apologies for being half of the questions in the thread recently.
Anyways, I am thinking of wiping my laptop (clean Windows reinstall). I have two questions about this:
should I do it? and
a question about backing up (see below for actual question).
Should I do it?Why I think I should:
-Viruses. Despite hours of work and many antivirus programs trying to clean it, adware persists, and there may be spyware that I am unaware of.
-This
Link
issue. I think that the gradual loss of memory is continuing (but I'm not sure). Possibly also due to malware.
-It has gradually slowed down over time, and presumably a clean start would speed it up, right?
-Recently, it has started telling me that I am not running genuine windows, although I am. Not a problem in itself, really, but possibly indicative of another issue?
-Most recently, it has just stopped recognizing wifi networks as existing, so I can't access the internet.
-I can't get Windows updates. This is unrelated to the lack of internet, as it was happening for a while before that.
-I don't have a whole lot to lose, unless I manage to completely screw up the reinstall. All the files I want to keep are either on an SD card or can be re downloaded at will (ie steam games).
Why I think I maybe shouldn't:
-I make not certain that the memory loss issue is actually continuing. I might put this off another day to make sure.
-I don't
need to wipe it to speed it up; I could probably just go about cleaning it of bloat myself. That would take a lot of work though, and I've tried without success before.
-Just doing windows repair might solve the "not genuine windows" problem, but I haven't tried.
-The internet issue may be a hardware problem, but I don't think it is.
-I may completely screw up the reinstall. Somehow.
-Also, I may have forgotten to put something important on the SD card. Which brings me to the second question...
Backing stuff up.Background information:
I was planning to back up the whole hard drive on the Internet, but with my internet connection having failed, I can no longer do so.
However, I recently discovered that I have a second partition on the laptop with practically nothing on it and three times the amount of space as the drive I'm currently using. I have no idea why, but I thought previously that the blue file names meant it was just linking to other areas of the drive or something. Looking it up, it turns out that those are just automatically compressed files.
Obviously, I can't just move my stuff over to that partition; otherwise, I'd just be taking all the viruses 'n stuff and putting them somewhere else. This is where my actual question comes in.
Actual question:
Can I set it up so that I can create a copy of all the things on my computer, put it on the second partition, and have it so that nothing there has permissions to do anything?
In case that doesn't make sense, basically, I want to be able to recover everything if I need to, but I don't want the bad stuff to be able to mess with my other stuff after I wipe the main partition.
I hope that that last question wasn't phrased too poorly, and thanks in advance for any and all advice.