New book New ideas

[Mark Miller]

Hi everybody ,
Just got through with a new book on XP.
Naked Windows Xp by Dan Gookin
One point he made which I never heard before is that you never have to reformat your hard drive except when your Windows folder is corrupted. He says most of the time people {tech support} tell you to do this because they are on clock.
What do you think?
By the way the book is for intermediate users and is pretty funny.
Thanks Mark:)

[mjc]

Yes, most of the time that is true...

That is something most of the regulars here have always believed in, reformatting is the last resort. But I am starting to lean more and more towards a reformat (actually go as far as wipe the drive) for certain virus/trojan/worm infections even if the Win directory is not corrupted. Also on many off the shelf machines, you have no choice. You don't have a real OS disk so you don't really have a source for "clean" files, because most of the time the restore CD is just a drive image.