I've been given a laptop (circa 2002) and I want to wipe it and start again. So what would a complete novice need to do to rebuild this laptop with Win2000 etc?

Cheers
F

 

Here's what I'd do if I was rebuilding a laptop (or any machine)

1: Boot the thing up and find out what video, ethernet, modem, cd/dvd drivers it's using and make a note of them.

2: Decide what OS you want to put on the machine, and check the machine is compatible with this version of the OS.

3: BEFORE you format the machine, go on thr internet, locate and download the correct drivers for the devices mentioned in step 1.

4: If there is anything on the machine you want, back it up

5: Use your full OS CD, boot the machine from it, and get it to reformat the hard drive, and then install the OS onto it.

6: When the OS boots, if you're ultra lucky, the devices will already have drivers for them (well, if the OS is XP), if not, then you'll be seeing quite a lot of the 'add hardware' wizard, and this is where you'll use the drivers you downloaded.

Once all of this is done, you should have a nice spanking new machine.

 

What you might also want to consider is partitioning the drive (would be part of step 5, as I know you can do this within windows 2000 installer).

I've got my servers (ok, so they're not laptops, but I would do the same) setup with 2 partitions, a 'system' partition and a 'data' partition.

The idea behind this is that all data, eg; applications, music, movies, documents, essentially anything non-system like, is stored on the data partition, and the system partition has only the OS on it. Why? well, if I ever need to reinstall the OS, I can do so, without removing and thus having to reinstall, all the apps and other things. I also keep a copy of the drivers on the other partition as well, so it helps speed things up when I do reinstall.

 

Many thanks. Oh and can you recommend a good free virus checker?

F

 

hmm, free virus checker. Not sure. We use SRN micro's "Solo" antivirus, it's not free, but has a 30 day trial (which seemed to last a lot longer than 30 days when I installed it), so that might do you to get started. To be honest, AV software is something I'd shell out for.

Free spyware, that's easy, Spybot Search and Destroy. Fantastic, and free.

Whack both of those on your system and you shouldn't have any problems.