4. Reloading Windows

{mosgoogle}Now that you have deleted the unneeded files and directories you will have to give yourself an operating system to reload all of your software into. I prefer Windows XP now although if you have a bit of an older computer Windows 2000 will probably be fine and takes less system resources.

Just a note here, Windows 98 is a bad choice and there are a few reasons why. Windows 98 is not supported anymore by Microsoft so it does not have any new security fixes or drivers being written for it. One other issue is that the underlying file system that Windows 98 supports is FAT32, if you are loading Windows 2000 or XP you will likely want to take advantage of NTFS but the only good way to do this with a fresh load is to format your machine, this will delete all of the data that you have on your PC now. If you are moving from Windows 98 there will be a spot in the install asking if you would like to format or convert the drive to NTFS, I would avoid this as you can convert after you have switched your PC to Windows XP in Disk Management from the Computer management application in Windows.

The rest of the install should go smoothly and after you have finished you will have a nice new clean install of Windows with only the recycle bin on the desktop and no applications. Perhaps the desktop is only 256 colors or the size is not quite right but this is where you will fix that problem by reloading your drivers. Go to start and right click on the “MY Computer” icon and select properties, go to the hardware tab, now find the device manager and anything with an exclamation point or a red X will need a new driver. Right click on the icon, select update driver and walk through finding your drivers. If you can not find the driver in the lookup then you may have to go back to the mydrivers folder and run the executables for the drivers which may quicken the process of loading new drivers.