Tutorials by Roe - Formatting your X.P. Hard Drive and Installing a fresh O/S

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I have been asked lately by several people how to format their systems as their computers are running slower and slower by the day. The first thing you need to be aware of is that this is happening mainly due to the fact that people keep installing programs on their computers and even though they never used the programs they don't bother to remove them. Every computer only has so much space and if you keep installing without removing other programs your computer will become full and slow until it eventually comes to a complete stop. On the other hand you may only have about twenty programs on your computer and its going extremely slow. This is usually because all the programs are running at the same time and eating up your processors speed and of course your RAM. O.K., to format your hard drive in windows X.P. heres what you need. A hard drive to format and a Microsoft windows X.P. C.D. In this one we're going to format your C: Drive, this is the hard drive in your system that usually contains your operating system. This is very easy to do, the main thing to remember is not to panic as instructions will appear on the screen most of the way through the operation. Pop the Microsoft X.P. C.D. in to your C.D. Drive and reboot the computer. When the computer is turning back on in the top left hand corner of the screen you'll see the writing to boot from C.D. press any key, so go ahead and press any key, this will start the operation. It will first ask you what do you want to do. Install a fresh copy of windows Repair this copy of windows and something else which I can't remember but its not important as you need to select Install a fresh or new copy of windows. Once you've selected this it will ask you where you want to install it and it will show you a table of all partitions on your system. It will also ask you do you want to delete the partitioned spaces. Make sure you delete all partitions as this will make your drive as large as possible once you've installed your new copy of x.p. It will ask you several times if you want to delete each partition and it will make you press different keys to make sure you do in fact want to do this. You'll be asked to press the escape key to confirm you want to delete it, then D, then L and so on but maybe not in that order. You will be asked to follow this procedure for every partition you delete. Once you've deleted them all you'll be left with one big unpartitioned space which you'll select to install your new operating system on. Once you've selected the space and the process is underway the computer may power up and down once or twice, during this time do not remove the X.P. C.D. and when its rebooting it may again ask you to press any key to boot from the C.D. DON'T, just leave it do its own thing. On occasion the installation will stop and give you the chance to input certain geographical options, such as the language you wish the computer to be in, the time zone you want to be in, the setup of your keyboard. Set these options as you wish and then press next and the installation will continue. Towards the end of the installation the computer will run through some setup features asking you to input your name and to set a password and some other things, once you've run through these thats your computer freshly installed. Remember though at this stage you have no antivirus software and only a windows firewall so you really should install these things first as you don't want to contract a virus after going through all this hassle. One point to remember before starting this is that anything you had on your hard drive before formatting will be long gone, deleted and completely inaccessible to you from now on so make sure theres nothing you want on the hard drive before you begin this operation. If any of you do follow these instruction and get a bit lost on your way just contact me and I'll be happy to help you out