What gets corrupted after a while?

[949]

im planning on using two hard drives.

i have never used the raptor nor head of it before last month.
so i was thinking of venturing into getting a raptor. either a 74 gb or a 150 gb which ever my budget will allow. it will be paired with a western digital 500 gb.

my idea will be to use one for vista 64 and the other just for all the storage. the reason im doing this is because i noticed that windows eventually becomes corrupted with all the internet usages. i rarely install programs so i dont have issues there but with many spyware and such, it tends to want to inbed itself to the hard drive automatically. so i was curious if it does it again would my programs be corrupted only or will both the OS and programs be corrupted?

another thought i have would be, can i seperate my programs such as games or microsoft office from the OS when i reinstall the whole thing? so i need to format and reinstall i dont want to redo my programs, just the OS. assuming my thought be that only the OS is being corrupted after long uses.

 

[gwiz1987]

you can create an image of the HDD after installing the OS, drivers and the programs you need, by using a program called acronis true image home (i don't know any open source programs that do the same thing) . i usually install the os, drivers, programs that i use often eg, openoffice, winrar, firefox, etc, and all the available updates eg. directx, .net frameworks, etc. then install acronis and do an image backup. whenever i need/want to reinstall windows, i just load the image and overwrite the hdd with the os on it (backing up all yr files onto another storage device beforehand). it'll feel like new. also, you can update the image when u wanna add more stuff l8r on.