How often show you blow away your system and rebuild it?
You can save yourself a great deal of effort and frustration if, once you get your system just the way you like it, you make an image of your system's disk and copy it to a safe location.
Rebuilding a Windows system is a major piece of work. It takes me hours for the rebuild, and even longer to test things to the point I'm confident I haven't overlooked something. Creating an image at each step along the way is a good idea. The more images, the less distance you need to backtrack if things go wrong. A minimum would be: Vanilla Win98; Win98 with drivers and configured for your hardware; and Win98 with Your Software.
Unfortunately, Win98 gets cranky regularly. I fix this by restoring an image made when Win98 was in a better mood. Since this only takes a few minutes, it's always easier than trying to determine what's irritating my system. As time goes by, I become happier with my system and experiment less. Fewer opportunities for trouble lead to increased reliability and longer periods between rebuilds. I'd say once a year would be reasonable if you're working from scratch, but if you're just restoring a disk image, I'd be tempted to do it every few months. A ton of crap accumulates quickly and it's nice to be rid of it.
If you plan to do the 'from scratch' rebuild, do yourself a favour and make an image first. If you get 'stuck', you'll always be able to return home. In previous posts, I've recommended Drive Image from PowerQuest, but in a pinch Win98 backup is still better than nothing. (Just don't erase your backup file when you wipe the slate clean!)
Hope this helps, PW.
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