What do I EXACTLY need to format a Windows XP Home edition notebook?

3 Comments

1. b3t b0y says:

   March 10, 2010 at 2:09 am

   i’m not sure wat is xp recovery disk, looks like to recover the windows systems files if your windows have problem in load some of the programs…
   i think to get the best result, you need to format it..
   1. of course you need the windows xp disk.. i suggest the professional edition not the home edition
   2. after it i’m not sure what is your laptop but sometimes you will need the driver for some of your part like sound card, vga card, ethernet card..maybe i suggest you try to find these from your laptop support official sites..
   3. the disk of applications that you will use, like microsoft office, adobe reader, or any others that you use for your activities..of course after you reformat you need to install that again..
2. jaggie_c says:

   March 10, 2010 at 2:09 am

   You just need to load the OS. If it is crawling still, then there could be a problem with the hard disk. Try a new hard drive.

   If you have the OS cd then installing it will do the needful. While the forgotten data on the disk won’t cause any problems, some softwares can still recover the data.

   Once the OS is loaded and windows up and running, write couple of batch files that will simply fill up the disk space with a big junk file. Then delete it. Do it couple of times and it will take care of your old data. Then do a disk fragmentation which will put the data together in adjuscant sides so that retrieval will be faster.
3. gamingenius says:

   March 10, 2010 at 2:09 am

   The recovery cd is only helpful if you are trying to keep your notebook from losing it’s data due to corruption in the windows OS. You will need the full cd in order to do what you want, which is formatting your drive with a fresh start of windows xp.