discussion/questions about upgrading a gentoosystem?

[olal]

Hi. About a year ago I installed gentoo on my backupserver/webserver (testing only)/etc.. at home (p2-333 / 192mb ram / 80gb hdd). It have been used ever since & it works pretty well. This was almost my first linuxinstallation I made of my own so I did the stage3 installation & made everything as easy as I could, with the knowledge i had at the time. Ever since I have helped friends with there installations, installed workstationsystem on my laptop etc.. so I've learned quite alot.

The thing I'm thinking about now is whats the easyest way uppgrading the system? Might it even be easyer to reinstall it & save all my /etc-files? I dont like the idea with re-install att all.. feels like windows.. but I dont have all time in world just fiddling around with the system (unfortunatley..).

Any comments on this?