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Can anyone help me?  I would like to know if there is a benifit to wiping the hard drive to install Win98 w/o a previous OS as opposed to upgrading Win95.  (assuming I have backed up all  files, settings and have copies of my programs)

Can anyone help me?  I would like to know if there is a benifit to wiping the hard drive to install Win98 w/o a previous OS as opposed to upgrading Win95.  (assuming I have backed up all  files, settings and have copies of my programs) If you know what you're doing, a clean reformat of your HDD and Install of Win '98 can be a good thing for your computer.  I try to reformat and reinstall every few months, mainly because it deletes all the gunk that those numerous shareware programs have left behind after uninstallation, and it usually makes booting-up and shutting-down smoother, and can fix some bugs you may have been having. Just be careful and make sure that you have the latest video card/modem/sound card drivers and all the patches for Win '98 ready for after you have installed it! Good luck!

I admit that I used to belong to the *wipe it out and start from scratch* camp. I no longer belong to that camp and I'll tell you why. First let me start by saying that windows users need to keep up the demands on Microsoft for quality, by doing a format every 6 months or everytime a upgrade is to be applied you are giving in to mediocrity; this does no one any good. This should not be taken to mean that poor maintence habits are to be forgiven.. thier not. My main system had a win98 install on it from 11/9/98 to 10/04/99, during that time I did countless software installs, uninstalls, countless minor system software upgrades, hardware additions/changes and plenty of system tinkering (always looking for more speed (with what I have got) or more convenience in the way I work with my system). The reason IMO that my install lasted so long (and could have kept right on going) is that I finally made myself perform good maintence habits and the fact that win98 has much better system tools to work with then previous versions of windows. I did the major upgrade 10/04/99 of going to win98SE so I could see for myself what problems that people were talking about would affect me; so far the only problem that is annoying me is the occasional scrambling of desktop Icons, other than that all is well. (I believe the win98SE *shutdown* issue is limited to ATX boards) My point is this; if a system is running well and has no major problems that would require resolution before a major upgrade then do so. If someone is upgrading in part to resolve major software issues then they are better off IMO starting with a freshly fdisk'ed and formated drive. The time it takes to rebuild a system that has been freshly formated should not be taken trivially, it can upwards of a week to restore and configure a previously mature system.. most people consider thier time to be precious. Marshall

on Microsoft for quality, by doing a format every 6 months or everytime a upgrade is to be applied you are giving in to mediocrity; this does no one any good. I dunno.  I like a good reformat for the fact of the amount of system cleaning it does.  My Linux partition used to get the same treatment as my Windows partition - whenever I felt that there were files everywhere which weren't needed - a backup of all my important stuff would go to some floppies or a CD-R and a re-install would be initiated.  It's not giving into mediocrity, because if you have a smallish HDD (like my 4.3Gb), you'll soon notice an increase in free space of ~100Mb in Windows (or ~10Mb in Linux  which is a lot. You can't accuse me of bad housekeeping, because task scheduler runs Defrag, cleanup and lots of maintenance at night, and I'm a very experienced Windows user. I think a reformat is good, because it forces you into reconsidering what is important.  Maybe you have a lot of shareware apps on your computer that you don't use, and after a reformat you realise that it would be pointless to re-install them.  I like to think it's like cleaning out a _base_ment full of old boxes of newspapers and junk you've accumulated. Overall, it's a very subjective argument.  Inexperienced users or people who only use their computer occasionally would probably not benefit whatsoever from a reformat, but experienced users with limited HDD/system resources would probably find a frequent clearout to be a very-good-thing .