Harddrive Format To Start Again

[DrEvil270183]

Basically my PC hasnt been itself for the past few months. found one of my memory had come loose so sorted all that out and back to normal but keep getting lots of trojan horse generic messages, tried everything i have to remove them but it doesnt seem to be happening. im thinking about a clean install but not sure how successful it will be and want some advise first please.

ive got windows xp and thats all legal with serial numbers etc. ive got drivers for motherboard, soundcard and graphics card. other than all my software and codecs etc ive obtained over past years, is these anything else i might need. And whats that best way to go about this.

Cheers, TIm.

[Dan Campbell]

Set aside a few hours to do it in! Getting all the updates from windows can take a while. In the past i've gone through my program files lisiting programs I want to keep/reinstall. Get a second hard drive/partition and store all the data you want to keep (photos etc). Install your antivirus before connecting to the net if possible, if not, do it asap! Get all you disks etc ready before commencing so you don't find halfway that you can't install your sound driver or something .

It'll make a massive difference if it's been a while on the same install.

Double check you have nothing stored that you'll remove and never be able to recover/find again. It's not a good feeling

Hope that's of some use.

[JD™]

Set aside a few hours to do it in! Getting all the updates from windows can take a while. In the past i've gone through my program files lisiting programs I want to keep/reinstall. Get a second hard drive/partition and store all the data you want to keep (photos etc). Install your antivirus before connecting to the net if possible, if not, do it asap! Get all you disks etc ready before commencing so you don't find halfway that you can't install your sound driver or something .

It'll make a massive difference if it's been a while on the same install.

Double check you have nothing stored that you'll remove and never be able to recover/find again. It's not a good feeling

Hope that's of some use.

all that he said, except i would add that as much as having everything in advance is EXTREMELY preferable, do not fret if you dont have everything. as long as you have enough to get on the net (after anti virus, as said) then you can sort everything else out from there. This is the way I always do it, because it makes me get the most recent drivers

Good Luck, its not as stressful as you'd think.

J

[DrEvil270183]

cool, think ill download AVG etc to external harddrive so i can install them from there before going online etc.

so ill format everything, install windows and then install motherboard drivers and so on.

should be interesting. cheers for the help, much appreciated.

Tim