Another recommendation is to get a good piece of backup software.  I did two things when I put in the new drives this year.  I backed up my Windows install to a CD (clean install - Windows only) and I bought Norton Ghost.  I do backups of my C drive, my D drive (my 3d applications drive), my E drive (my 2d applications drive) and my J drive (my Runtimes drive).  All of these are backed up weekly to an external hard drive specifically for this purpose with a separate partition for each drive backup.  This way I never have to reinstall my programs since all the registry information is in the C drive backup.

My backups are done weekly - the C drive on Sunday morning, the D drive on Monday morning, the E drive on Tuesday morning and the J drive on Wednesday morning.  Since these are all incremental backups the only thing written are any differences.  This is where Ghost is absolutely the best.  It makes one base backup (a full one) and each backup after that is incremental.  I learned a long time ago that this is just something that has to be done for PC health.  My virus scan runs every night, my spyware every morning and the defrag every day.
It's a little inconvenient but with the amount of time and money I have in this machine, it's worth it.

Hugz from Phoenix, USA

Victoria

Remember, sometimes the dragon wins. Correction: MOST times.