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Over time your computer, like your car, doesn't run as well as it once did. You may do all the things you're supposed to like defragment the hard drive, clean the registry, remove junk files and so on. Often, after a period of time, it's not your maintenance that's the problem. More likely your copy of Windows has become corrupted. Through power outages, power surges, turning the computer off improperly, and many other factors. You don't need to clean your PC and you don't need to repair Windows. What's needed is a "clean install" of Windows XP. Here's how!

You're going to be very happy with your nice, fresh, "clean install" of Windows XP. I'm pretty sure about that. I'm also very sure that you won't be happy if you forget to backup your photos, or music, or documents, or program data. This segment helps you get a handle on things to backup and things you don't want to forget. Trust me on this.

With a thorough backup in place, we undertake the first step in reinstalling Windows XP: booting from the Windows XP CD, selecting to do a clean install of Windows and selecting a filesystem to use when formatting the hard drive.

In part 3 of our video guide to reinstalling Windows XP we got as far as selecting a partition to install to. Now it's time to pick a formatting option. Your options are to do nothing, to do "quick" formats, or to do full formats, but using FAT32 or NTFS? Here's where I'll give you some tips.

Sometimes when you put your CD in the drive and restart Windows it just reboots and goes straight back to Windows. Misses your CD all together. The reason? Your computers "boot order" probably isn't set to see your disc drive before your hard drive. No problem because we can go in and fix that.

As we progress with our

reinstall Windows

needs some input from us. There are regional settings, network settings, and other options and preferences that we'll need to set. We're on the downhill side of doing a fresh,

clean install of Windows XP

.

Just a few things to

finalize and our reinstall

will be done. There are just a few more steps until we have a fresh,

clean copy of Windows XP

up and running. First, we set the date, time and regional options, get a quick tour of

Windows XP

, set up our network information, computer name, user account and other pertinent details.

We've finished our

clean install of Windows XP

, but we're not quite done. Remember, this copy of XP is freshly installed so it doesn't have any updates installed. You need to visit the

Windows Update center

to get all the updates your newly installed copy of Windows needs.

You've visited Windows Update and gotten everything you needed from there. Now it's time to

restore all the items you backed up

before this adventure started. Your documents, photos, music, bookmarks, desktop items, and more. If you backed up programs and data you can use your backup program to restore everything as it was. If you only backed up data then it's time to

reinstall your programs

and put the data back in its place.

Your computer is an investment of time and money. You've just invested a few hours to

make it run better

. Now, it's time to protect that investment. You need to maintain your computer and protect it from threats it may encounter.