[Halm]

My work laptop is a Dell Latitude 6410 with the add-on Nvidia video card. Something in the software has corrupted. Every few minutes the system freezes, the screen goes black and then the video resets. I have been on the phone with Dell and we have replaced the motherboard twice and the other sub-systems once. We have tried the new Dell video driver and the newer yet Nvidia drivers. I have tried to roll back to earlier drivers. I have spent hours on the Internet looking for the solution.

Dell says, and I have seen this in numerous tech postings, that the answer is to reload my OS. The problem is, of course, that the laptop is my life. I have dozens of applications installed and tweaked. It will take me at least 1, maybe 2 days to reload after a fresh OS install.

Okay, I should know this but I don’t. . . If I do a Windows System Restore level backup, will that overwrite the OS as well as restore my data? Also, doesn’t that put my applications back in place too?

Any other suggestions on how to do this?