Reinstalling XP

cornbb

Hey guys,

My Dell laptop is 2 years old now and is fairly clogged up and chuggish. I've had spyware/virus problems which have been removed but they've caused the machine to slow down and hang from time to time. I have a P4 with 512 RAM and a big hard disk running XP pro. I mostly use it for audio recording and processing applications.

Anyone know whether reinstalling Windows will solve my problems? Could i get away with just reinstalling the Windows files and hence avoid the need to reinstall all my applications or would it be best to reformat the hard drives and start from scratch again?

The_Goose

Format that sucker.
I had basically the same problem only last month. Slow and constantly restarting by itself. Formatted and rebuilt it from scratch. Runs great now.
Formatt gets rid of all those useless programmes and spyware that you cant.

Just remember your keys, serials, passwords etc.

Endurance Man

Good lord, 2 years. Format, format it now!

Lord Oz

And if it's still sluggish, buy a stick of memory for it. Upgrading memory for laptops is really easy, I got a huge performance boost from it. There's some Irish website that's great for buying memory, and they tell you what memory your laptop uses and you can buy it from them, I can't remember the name though. Maybe someone knows what site I'm on about?

garthv

Aye windows xp needs to be reinstalled every 6 months to get peak performance out of it(in my experience anyway). But like Lord Oz said if its not running as fast as youd like after the install then just stick in some extra RAM

cornbb

Aye, some RAM might be a good idea too. I have an external HDD so backing stuff up won't be a problem. Now i hope i can find my XP disc and all of the other crap I'll need to reinstall...