Fighting Irish Forums

I need a little help. I got a laptop for christmas and I need to completely reboot it. What I mean by this is to make the computer just like it was when I first turned it on(with no games, files, or any other programs that I have put on). I guess that means wiping the harddrive clean. I am not good with computers, so I was wondering if anybody knew how to do this.



-thanks

Go to Control Panel/
Add/Remove Programs
Uninstall all the stuff You've put on. You may have to manually delete some folders.

You can get a free DL of CCleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/
Use this to get rid of all Temporary internet files etc. It also has an easy to use registry cleaner to get rid of anything left behind. ( It will ask you to make a backup before deleting unused registry keys)

Empty the recycle bin and just for good measure do a defrag of the HD.

What support disks did you get with it?

Do you mean a complete strip down/rebuild or just remoiving stuff you have installed.

As you have had it less than a month, it might be worth explaining what the problem is rather than going the route you are currently looking at. Could be there is a less drastic solution.

G

I've done this about a million times. A million. Millions. If you have another computer to talk on teamspeak, I could walk you through it. Windows XP?

Uninstalling and ccleaner is a good thing, but sometimes windows just decays, and needs to be installed on a clean wipe. A lot of times there are services, be they spyware or just obnoxious AOL stuff etc... that take a lot of resources, or some replaced dll that does obnoxious stuff or other broken stuff.

If you take the "remove stuff but keep the install" route, I recommend (after doing what sneaky russian suggested) hitting ctrl-alt-del, clicking the processes tab, and walking down the list, googling each process, and making sure it's something you need. If it isn't, then you have to find out how it is starting and remove it. ccleaner is nice because it allows you easy access to the hidden startup scripts (besides your startup folder in windows). This takes about 15 minutes of tedium, but it can help you enormously!

Then you have to make sure you have no viruses or spyware, which you can do for free from free.grisoft.com

HTH,
Jack

Also, (sorry) you want to do windows update over and over until it tells you there's nothing more to update *before* you start trying to clean it. This will keep dirty processes from clinging to your system. Windows update is somewhere in your start menu.