How to reinstall windows.old (win7) after installing win7 for 2nd time

I had phoned Dell to get help with a video card issue. They decided to make some changes to my computer ( and no a back up was not done first). Unfortunately this individual did not know what they were doing and my computer would no longer load windows not even from a boot disk. After much playing around we were able to get windows reinstalled however everything had moved to windows old. I was hoping to bring back the windows old so that I would not have to reinstall everything. I spent all day yesterday reinstalling all of my drivers and today am working on installing office. A simple question has become a nightmare - one that I have spent over 14 hours on so far.

I see. Dismal. In that case I can understand why you might have wanted to roll back windows.old to have your old install back - especially because reinstall should be the last resort during troubleshooting of a display issue. Did they have you reinstall the card driver, then the card? We have experts here who know video cards well enough they could have you sorted quickly.

What I can reassure you is that a clean reinstall is better than getting a new computer today with all of the pre-installed bloatware, providing you used a Reinstallation DVD and not the bloated Recovery Disks. If you take the time now to get it right then save a Backup Image you'll never have to reinstall again - just reimage from the stored image in 20 minutes if Win7 ever becomes irreparable again, ideally after giving us a chance to help you repair it.

Again here are steps to get a perfect reinstall which might also help with your setup and maintenance: Reinstalling Windows 7

In case that was a factory recovery disk you used, here are steps to Clean up factory bloatware to get best performance.

And here are basic troubleshooting steps to save if you need them. Feel free to post up any other related issues here, or start a new thread at any time for others.

Okay. Here's my new question. I can access an older back up however if I try to restore it will not go to my new account. I can transfer some items but cant access other eg. outlook.pst file. I now have to sets of user files but only one user account. Urrgghhh! How can I fix this mess?
Audrey

What kind of backup is it? Image backup or file backup? Which app did you use?

Easiest method for backing up files is dragging active User folders along with mail backup,etc. to external manually, without the extra layers of potential failure with a transfer or backup program.