FORMATTING

[Jo New]

FORMATTING, please can someone give us an idea how to do it?
is it that you uninstall everything ?

thanks joanne

[RJ_Paton]

Formatting is basically wiping everything on your drive ... you don't uninstall anything ... quite the reverse you should make a backup onto other media of any files that you want to keep.

Its not generally advisable to format your main drive unless there are serious problems and a complete restart is necessary

There are different procedures depending on whether you are doing it as part of a re install of an operating system or for other reasons .... if you could publish some more information I'm sure someone could show you the right way to go.

[Lloydy]

Hi Joanne

What exactly are you trying to format?! 

[PeterSzewc]

If you are talking about reformatting your hard drive... the way I do it is to purchase a new drive, install it as the primary, change your existing drive to secondary, install your operating system on the new primary and then you have time to migrate all of your data to the new drive before reformatting the old one. Then when the time comes to refromat again... just swap the drives and do the same procedure. If you use your computer quite a lot, it is good to reformat and reload Windows every 6 months to keep the speed up. Remeber you have to re-install all of your software each time.

Peter.   

[Zeb]

If you haven't re-installed Windows on a clean hard drive it's surprising how fast it would boot up if you did.  I'm extremely careful of what I install on my machine because whenever you uninstall anything (trying out shareware programs for example) there are always some files left behind and as time passes it slowly increases the length of time Windows takes to boot up.

I built my computer myself so I don't have a "Restore" disk which comes with new machines so instead I have Norton Ghost installed.  Whenever it comes to re-installing everything I just run Ghost which puts everything back on with everything set up how I like it.

When I'm working on customer's machines and it comes to reinstalling Windows I use an old Windows 98 bootdisk for the FDISK command but this isn't advised unless you know what you're doing or have a phone number handy for someone you can call for help should you need it.