My machine i starting to show some signs of wear now in that there are stutters coming in, random glitches every now and again, junction links broken and I have recently had a failed external hard drive. Therefore, I'm taking this as a chance to wipe my machine and reinstall everything afresh.

Any tips on doing this, and any way to speed up reinstalling plugins etc?

 

A lot of (some) VSTi / VST will just need the .dll files. Backup ur presets (if ya use them) if they're in a different location (ie documents). I mean, you should backup stuff ya need "immediately" in separate .rar generally (projects etcs) just in case of unexpected foobar. Helps if you have locations and stuff all ready to go in WinRAR. Even stuff like Omnisphere is pretty easy to "reinstall" just by recreating everything (one folder on C: ) manually, leave the rest untouched by fresh install. I usually create a VSTi, VST and VSTdata folder separately from C. At very least. I mean, I'm assuming that you have sample libs & VST/i on different drives, already? If not, do that first! Also remember to prioritise background process in Win etcs, cos I know I usually forget that for ages on fresh install :D

 

backup your registry so you can partially restore your licences.