reinstalling windows xp professional

[gregmacca]

I have had to reinstall xp professional on my machine due to some software conflicts i have had with eg video drivers. I select a complete reinstall but then when this is finished I have a completely new version except that all the program files that were on the machine before are still there. I can't uninstall them as they don't appear on the add/remove programs list. They are taking up a lot of the hard disk space. How can I reinstall so that I don't have any of these program files when the operating system has finished reinstalling? Do I have to format the hard drive before reinstalling? If so should I use the xp professional set of boot disks from the microsoft website or should I use the windows 98 boot disk (it seems odd to me but i read it somewhere)?

Thanks

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

Do you not get the option to partition and format when you boot with the XP cd in the drive??

Murray

 

[linney]

These might help you.

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/indexwinxp.htm

HOW TO: Partition and Format a Hard Disk in Windows XP (Q313348)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q313/3/48.asp

 

[fenn007]

Hi,

I did the reinstall a week ago, I used a boot disk from a site called "bootdisk.com" after reformatting my drive I just did a clean install and then installed SP1, then all my programs ran their updates and my machine is so good, it's like a new system.

I can recommend this to anyone who downloads trial S/W and forgets to uninstall it. Good housekeeping leads to less problems on your system.