Clean Windows Re-Install

[Johnny Boy]

Morning all,

I want to perform a clean re-installation of XP, what is the recommended way of getting rid of the current rubbish on the hard drive?

Thanks

John

 

[cookie]

Morning all,

I want to perform a clean re-installation of XP, what is the recommended way of getting rid of the current rubbish on the hard drive?

Thanks

John

it will all be taken care of during install. XP gives fairly easy to follow instructions as it goes along. just boot from the XP disc and take it from there. you may need to alter the BIOS to boot from CD.

don't forget to back up anything youmay want first. browser favourites etc.

 

[jimbo]

I've just done my work PC. Its about 2 years old and has has all sorts of software installed and removed over the years. The last straw was when I made the mistake of putting office 07 on. It ran like a dog.
As Cookie said the install will clean up everything (unless you are concerned about people deliberately trying to recover deleted stuff - thats different)
Nice fresh XP install and it feels like a new machine, mine positively flys along now.

 

[Fanum]

When you whack the XP disc in, make a partition.....20 gig will be fine as 'C' drive, then make the rest of the disc 'D'.

Then install your clean copy of Windoze on 'c' and keep it really clean- I only allow Windows, the updates and the AV/Firewall progs on my C drive, keeping the D drive for progs, apps and games etc. (In fact I've got two other 500GB HD's that are partitioned separately for this but the principle remains the same.

Thereafter, you can defrag the partitions separately which is nice (and unless you have dual or quad core processors makes it immensely faster to do)

It also makes AV scanning quicker (you can do a section at a time) and it's a piece of pish to backup your installation.

In fact (I should have written this in first) once you've got Windoze installed, fully patched up, AV and Firewall software installed and patched and the printer, tv card and graphics card drives etc done, make an image of the new, clean C drive and save it...then next time you can just use that and have a new fresh install ready in 15 mins

 

[turbine_2]

Depends. If you want to start completely from scratch then when it asks you for where you want to install it select the delete partition option and then select the create partition. This will delete everything on that partion / drive (old applications, documents, files, etc) permanently (ish).
If you want to keep documents, I'd burn them to CD / DVD first then do the above.
If you want to keep the applications as well, then good luck but you won't get a very clean install at the end.