So I built my home desktop something like 3 years ago now, and at that time I was toying around with overclocking my system. I think at some point i damaged my OS install (Vista...) but never bothered to reinstall everything. It's worked for years, though I have some severe doubts about my OS integrity. For example, if I accidently press sleep in the start menu instead of shut down, the computer will never wake up. Or rather, no matter what I do I can't get the display to do other than resetting the bios. This is just an example. There are other quirks of the system as well in terms of other disk utilities etc.
Now, I want to upgrade my system, probably going to go with a i3-2120 (unless I get talked into a quad core...). But I need some advice on my system upgrade. I will definitely need a fresh install of windows, and I'm pretty sure I would rather NOT go with Vista again so I think I'm going to shell out the 100 for Win7. The advice I need is on if there is a way / purpose to save the files on my computer. I have several gigs of Steam games installed (along with photos videos and other stuff) and my wonderful ISP has recently decided that Bandwidth limits are a good idea which may make re-downloading many of them cost prohibitive. I was hoping to salvage some of the files, while still having a fresh install of windows. Is the only way to do this with a new hard disk?
And on this point, would a SSD be a good way to solve the problem? A bad way to solve the problem? Would I get anything out of it other than slightly faster boot up times?
Best, thanks.