Reinstall? Do I need to

[Shooty*]

Morning all,
would appreciate some advice.
I recently contracted a very, very persistent nasty piece of software (a strain of vundo or virtumonde as far as I could tell) on my XP rig. It's a single core system, and I'll shortly be upgrading to a dual core Vista Ultimate rig so I thought "eh, what the hell, I'll try Vista now".

So I did a fresh install on the XP drive.

Now, I have system files on C, games on G drive.

Obv, G remained untouched by the fresh install onto C. Just out of curiosity, I tried a load of my games to see if they'd work, and blow me, most of them did (can I name them? One starts with "q" and ends with "4", one starts with "D" and ends with "3", several start with "jedi" and end with various words, etc).

Now, my G drive will be transplanted to my "proper" vista rig when I put it together later. Is there any reason why I should reinstall the games that work without needing reinstallation? I'm thinking registry related stability or something. Or not? (incidentally, steam and all associated games seem to be working fine without reinstall, which I was v v v surprised about. Thought it would be a real PITA).

Not interested in save game info: I've backed up all my save game stuff elsewhere, so can move that easily. Just wondered if I should be reinstalling, in y'all opinion.

(oh, one problem I have found: games with extension packs: the extension packs don't work unless I reinstall)

[LuckyNV]

Steam games are all contained in the Valve folder, you can copy or backup the entire folder, no need to reinstall or anything.

Other games i can not comment, some work, some do not, generally I find EA games need a reinstall.

As for needing to reinstall, why not just try it out first, if they don't work, reinstall them ;p

[j.o.s.h.1408]

umm i alsways assumed that you had to re install everything on a fresh OS install

[Lucio]

There's a couple of arguements for doing a reinstall of everything, the primary one being without it you can't UNINSTALL the games later on as the registry hasn't got the required entries. The second being, yes some games won't work without proper installation, either due to anti-piracy features or more simply, it can't find where your save game files are.


Personally, I wouldn't risk it and I'd reinstall every piece of software bit by bit.

[Shooty*]

Yeah, that was what I thought.

I'm surprised at the number that do work without reinstallation. Am I allowed to name them? I can do you a list of what works and what don't.