Reinstalling XP & iPod as external disk drive

Hi,
I'm thinking of reinstalling Windows XP as my laptop is playing up a bit and is working fairly slowly etc etc. I have about 25GB of songs and videos, a few thousand emails in Outlook and a few hundred Word and Excel documents that I want to keep.

I have some questions:

1) Is it generally a good/bad idea to do a reinstall?
2) Can I use my 60GB ipod as an external hard drive to store my files during the reinstall? If so, how?
3) How can I keep my emails and reinstall them?
4) Is there anything else I should bear in mind, advice from people who have done anything similar?

Thanks!

 

1) Some would say yes - some would say no! I know of some people around here that do a reformat every few months to keep their pc up to scratch, personally I don't - once a year I will though. Reinstalling is the simple solution to anything, if you feel comfortable doing it and back everything up then go for it.

2) Yup you can, make sure Disk Mode is enabled. To do this, connect it, when it shows up in iTunes select enable Disk Mode (unless it's already checked). Then go to My Computer and it should show up as another drive - you can just drag and drop anything into it

3) Saving your emails - open Outlook > File > Export > follow it from there - simple stuff. Then once you've installed Windows, just do File > Import and follow the procedure. Just be sure to export the emails in an Outlook format (so I'd do a test by importing them into Outlook before doing the reinstall - just a failsafe thing I find helps).

4) Not really, if you feel comfortable doing a reformat and reinstall then go for it! Just be sure to back up all documents you need etc.

Good luck

 

Thanks so much!

 

Anytime, let us know how it went