Reinstall Windows Like New

July 25, 2008 by Ari
Filed under Search Engine Optimization

Reinstall Windows On Your PC

Have you grown completely tired of your slow PC? Upload this, and download that, and registry clean this, and pull out that. It gets to a point that you have so much crap on your computer that you want to run out to Circuit City and just buy a new one. But instead, let me save you a thousand dollars or two by reinstalling windows. First of all, you never have to go out and buy a new computer if you do this to your computer. In fact, you really are getting a new computer and a fresh re-start. Right off the bat, put away the recovery disks that came with the computer because you are going to find out that even though it says you can re-install or “repair” or start fresh by using those disks, you are making one grave error: you are going to be booting from the C drive and therefore, any problems on the computer (i.e., virus, etc.) that is maybe at the core of the reason why you want to throw out your PC, will not be removed that way.

What you have to do is make sure that when you decide to reformat your hard drive and really start fresh, is to ensure that you are rebooting from the CD in your drive and not your C Drive. So here are the instructions:

1) First off, grab one of those new little flash drives and put all your files on it (documents, spreadsheets, etc.)
2) Make a copy of your favorites folder too so you can just copy and paste it into your new Favorites folder once you are all done and that way you get to keep all your bookmarks from your browser.
3) Now make sure you run a little program called Key Recovery which will go through your computer and extract all your product license keys for your windows XP, Office, Adobe, etc that you may have and for which you will need the licenses to reactivate that software (just in case you have the CDs but don’t know where the license keys are).
4) Now, load the Windows Service Pack 2 CD into your CD drive or attachment drive if you have a laptop and restart your computer and while you have the dark start up screen hit the F12 key so that it can let you reboot the PC from the CD Drive and not the C Drive in the computer.
5) Do not under any circumstance load the CD and just go to your Windows (while its on) and reboot or start the process from there with Windows running or you will be rebooting from the C drive. Any viruses on your PC will still be there if you do it this way.
6) If it doesn’t want to reboot from the CD from doing this, do it over again and hit F1 or F2 depending on your PC and go into the BIOS and tell it to boot from the CD and not the C Drive. This is pretty easy to read on screen but more likely than not, you will see this option in the F12 area when you hit it.
7) Now that it starts to reboot from the CD Drive the Windows Setup will begin.
Next it will ask you if you want to set up Windows or repair it. Hit Enter to set up Windows.
9) You will immediately see the Microsoft License Agreement come up and hit F8 if you agree with the terms (which you have to anyway to proceed). If this License Agreement does not come up, you are doing something wrong and have to go back and retrace your steps above.
10) Next, the setup program will detect your old (existing) installation of Windows and its going to ask you if you want to repair it. Hit Esc to skip the repair because you don’t want that. Repairs of Windows PCs is like washing your car on a rainy day. Useless.
11) Now, the setup program is going to ask you where do you want to install Windows. Highlight the existing "C: Partition1" partition and hit D to delete it. Then Hit L to confirm.
12) Next, hit Enter to install Windows on the "Unpartitioned Space". Don’t be afraid, everything that was on the PC is gone by now anyway so its forward from here.
13) Now format the space as NTFS and continue the installation. Ignore any other mentions like NTFS (Quick etc). You want to clear the complete slate. You will need NTFS so choose it.
14) Once you do this the computer will begin to reformat your drive completely. All history gone. 14) After a ½ hour or so, the process is going to complete and Windows will ask you to assign it a password for the Administrator account. Do not leave this blank.
15) Once windows is installed and you are connected to the internet downloading your files and updates, it won’t take long before your computer is once again a victim of viruses and spyware intrusions. Put a password on it.
16) Follow through on the rest of the Windows installation and remember, don’t connect to the internet unless you really have to.
17) Now make sure that the first thing you do immediately after installation is to download or install TrendMicro, Symantec, PC Tools, or StopZilla. You will need this to avoid any future intrusion problems.
18) Next and after the installation of your critical virus and firewall security installs, now you can install your drivers for audio and graphics as found on your other disks etc.
19) You can now install the rest of your old programs and use the license keys to install them.
20) Finally and after all of the above, connect to the Internet and download all your updates etc. Avoid websites that may give you problems in the future and don’t install software just to see what its like since eventually it slows down your system like any other program.

If you were one step ahead you should keep a copy of all these programs Zipped on a Flash drive somewhere and any other updates or upgrades so that if you ever have to do this again, it will be much faster and easier. Hope this helps.