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It rather depends on how you are for backups; basically, is there anything on the machine which you need, or is it ok to just flatten the whole thing?
If it is ok, and you've got all your files backed up and all your program install disks ready, then yeah, reinstalling is the quickest and simplest way to solve your problems; manually removing nasties from the disk and registry can be very time-consuming and boring.
Assuming that you want to flatten the whole thing, disconnect the machine's network cable, put the Windows CD in the drive, shut the machine down, and boot it up. During the boot, you should have the option at some point (often you can press "F12", but it'll probably say on the screen "press such-and-such for boot menu") to choose which device you want to boot from; choose the CD. The CD will probably then say "press any key to boot from CD"; you'll need (obviously enough) to press a key at this point, otherwise the machine will just boot from the hard disk again.
If all goes well, the CD will boot up into the Windows installer; this is a self-contained thing, and thus shouldn't complain about it being an older version of Windows.
You'll get (I forget the exact sequence in which these appear) a partition table for your hard disk and a set of choices along the lines of "do you want to reinstall or repair Windows". You want to reinstall, and when you see the partition table list (which probably only has one partition on it) delete every partition listed. (This is the point of no return; you will be deleting all data from the disk.) Once all the partitions are deleted, you'll be left with a big block of "unpartitioned space". Select that, tell it you want to format it (slow) with NTFS and install Windows on it.
That will have started the installation process proper; from then, you will be presented with a bunch of options from time to time about how you want your machine set up. It'll probably take about half an hour to an hour before the machine reboots into Windows.
At that point, I'd advise you to immediately reinstall your virus checker, and then reinsert the network cable and let the virus checker download its own updates. Once the virus checker is happy, go to the Microsoft website here* and follow the download link for SP2. This is a large file, about 250Mo if memory serves me right.
After that, you can get the rest of the downloads from Windows Update; there's probably about two hundred or so needed to go from a fresh install of SP2 to ok, but you can just let Windows Update handle that.
Enjoy...
*http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/default.mspx |
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