I reformatted my computer like a year ago, and i want to reformatted again and i forgot how u do it. I’ve currently reformatted my computer using the operating system CD, when i did that, i found a lot of things missing, like the sound. I’ve look through all my CDs and found Drivers and Utilities Cd that says reinstalling Device Driver and using diagnostics, utilities and online documentation and another one that also says Drivers and Utilities but it said reinstalling conexant 56K Data/Fax Modem Software for Microsoft Window. Do I insert one of them when i reformat my computer?

I have been having sever data corruption issues with the game World of warcraft. i have run every diagnostic software known to me including checkdisk (windows xp sp3) Microsoft’s memory diagnostic tool and seagates hard drive diagnostic tool both windows and bootable CD versions and every diagnostic comes back squeaky Clean and ive even swapped my ram entirely. I have done a full system restore on my computer and i still cant get a stable install which leads me to believe i have a hard drive issue yet it passes every test. so basically my question is as stated above, is it possible for a hard drive to be going bad yet not fail diagnostics. If so is there any way to verify or at least gather further evidence that its the hard drive before i spend money on a new hard drive. (note it appears as if only world of warcraft is currently effected, i suspect its highly complicated file system is more likely to be damaged by a failing hard drive)
i have installed all patches and all blizz will tell me is its a hard drive issue or a ram issue. and it cant be a virus as i JUST reformatted my hard drive. i have also updated every driver in my system. and while its not a data coruption issue limewire shuts down when i attempt to preview a file

I was wondering if i reboot my computer will it remove my whole microsoft computer software? I had the computer fixed after it had a lot of viruses on it and the person cleared out everything and put a microsoft program on it. I want to reboot it because i have a lot of useless stuff on it and i want it to run faster. Please help?

After a lot of personal research, straightforward testing, and lessons learned, I came up with the following freeware solutions for keeping my system up and running.

FIREWALL
– COMODO Firewall Pro

ANTIVIRUS
– AOL Active Virus Shield (based on Kapersky)
– a-squared free

ANTISPYWARE
– SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition
– Microsoft Windows Defender
– SpywareBlaster
– McAfee SiteAdvisor

REGISTRY CLEANER
– Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal
– CCleaner

ANTISPAM
– SpamBayes

DEFRAGMENTER
– Speedfrag (a bit akward to use at first, but simply the best one available for free)

MEMORY OPTIMIZER
– Cacheman

All those software are free to everyone for personal use, they are also easy-to-use, non-intrusive (almost no pop-ups windows) and low-memory consuming.

My laptop is now booting up in 55s with 659 Mb of free RAM available (out of 1Gb total), and is decently fast.

I consider it good, but I would like to make it even better.. Any advise?

A family member has a failing computer running XP Pro whereas I have a spare drive on my own computer with an unused XP Pro installation already set up. My idea is to back up all his files/folders etc using the Back Up facility within Windows Live OneCare and then set him up on my spare drive. All XP installations in this house have passed Microsoft validation however, he does not have an installation CD but I can get his Product Key. I have two questions. What is the best method of preparing a computer for a fresh installation of XP Pro (is formatting the HDD too extreme)? Secondly, if I use my installation CD to re-install XP Pro on his computer but when the time comes to enter a Product Key, I enter HIS Product Key rather than my own, can that work? Are Product Keys only specific to the program/application being installed or are they specific to the individual installation CD being used?