System restore or wipe hard drive?

Factual Questions
1

I primarily use the laptop to do homework or surf the net; it’s about three years old. When I try to open Word I get “Preparing to install” then “This update package could not be opened. Verify that the update package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer update package”. When I try to reinstall it doesn’t work. I attempted to do a system restore and it doesn’t work.

There’s not a whole lot on this laptop other than a few documents that I’ve already copied onto a zip drive. I’m considering wiping the whole thing clean and starting over. Any suggestions would be very appreciated! I’ve been looking online for hours for solutions and am feeling very frustrated right now. All I want to do is get to Word so I can complete my homework.

2

What it is, is you have something from a previous install that is conflicting with your system.

You can try Microsofts Install Cleanup Utility

Here’s the link

You want to download the msicuu.exe file

This might help, it works in some cases for me. Others were a bit complicated

3

When it says “preparing to install”, you do have the disk in the disk drive, right? I know I’ve had to put the disk in even after thinking I’d completely installed it.