I've always hated rebuilding my OS, and I'm hard on a system, so I have to redo it every 9 to 12 months ... I highly recommend gosting (Norton Ghost, Acronis DiskImage). I bought a Seagate hard drive that came with a stripped down version of Acronis that only does ghost images ... cool thing is, one you get your system reinstalled and ghosted, you can rebuild it in about 5-10 minutes next time.