formatting hard drive with vista

[gasmick2]

Hi my son has a computer that is playing up a lot he wants to reformat the hard drive to get rid of all the info including vista, he wants to reinstall vista back on it is on the computer and he has the ref codes
but has no idea how to get into the format mode? and then into the new reinstall mode > also just another question after it has been formatted could he install xp instead he has that on cd
by the way he does not have a recovery disk
please help mick

 

[daozen]

He might have a recovery partition which is usually accessible on boot by pressing F2. Once in the recovery console you can do a full reinstall.

I wouldn't bother with XP anymore.

What sort of problems is he having I'm of the opinion that a reinstall is a last resort.

 

[gasmick2]

hi thanks for the reply he tells me its taking forever and a day to boot up and also a long time to get on websites etc
He has done a system restore/defrag /deleted cookies/ and done a scan with nortons so he ha staken off all that he wants and just wants to get back to basic settings so he can start again

thanks mick

 

[daozen]

He should try taking norton off!

Download and scan with HiJackThis and post the log here but dont do anything else with it.

 

[gasmick2]

Hi many thanks for the reply i will tell him i did mention about removing nortons but i will tell him about highjack

thanks mick

 

[Rechar]

Vista is attrocious...even Microsoft gave up on it so i'd suggest you roll back to XP, or think about getting windows 7, you can still get a cheap deal of around £60-£70. As he doesn't want to keep anything from the PC, it will be quicker and cleaner to just reformat/install.

Been a while since i've used XP so if any of this is wrong i apologize.

Normally your PC should be booting CD/DVD above Hard Drive as a priority so just putting the disc in the PC and rebooting, then pressing a key when it says "Press any key to boot from disc" will start you on the install proceedure.

You should get a list of all the paritions on your hard drive and asked which to install it onto, simply delete your current one and create a new one in the unpartitioned space then install to that partition.

Let windows install, job done.

If you don't have CD/DVD as a higher priority you'll need to go into your BIOS settings (usually by pressing delete or f2 during POST). Find the boot priority option and put your CD/DVD above the HD.

 

[daozen]

I've been using vista since sp1 and its fine as long as you can run it. Much better than xp. I'm upgrading to 7 soon as its meant to be less resource hungry.

If I had a computer that couldn't run vista I'd plum for linux over xp everytime.