Transcription:

Hey, students, welcome to Lesson Five of the BeYourOwnIT free computer training program. This lesson is going to be stepping up on the complexity a little bit for some of you. For the others, this will be a refresher. This is about information on how to load a fresh copy of Windows.

There are a lot of different scenarios wherein you’ll have to reinstall Windows, and I kind of broke it down into either you’re loading it on a brand new computer; you’re reinstalling Windows on a system that has crashed; or you’re loading a fresh copy on a crashed system. So that’s kind of the worst scenario ‑ when you’re loading it on a crashed system because oftentimes, you’re unable to recover files and it can be messy.

So to break it down, we load it on your computer. This is about the easiest install of your life. If it’s XP or Vista, almost everything, well, I should say that with XP, it’s extremely smooth. If it’s a newer computer, and it’s on Vista, it’s pretty smooth. If you boot the CDs, so [inaudible 1:34] pop the Windows CD in your computer, and restart the computer. So, turn it all the way off.

Now turn it back on, and it should give you the option to boot from CD, and you will see something that says, “Press any key to run setup.” If it doesn’t give that option to you, and it goes straight into Windows, or it crashes or whatever, you’ll need to go into the BIOS, which you can do by when you first turn on your computer, you can usually go into it by pressing Delete, and it will say, “Press Delete or F2 to enter setup.” And then you’ll want to look for Boot Order. You’ll want to make sure that CD‑ROM is the first thing.

On a fresh new system, I usually actually set it to CD‑ROM, and don’t even put a hard drive in there because you can change that later. Sometimes it’s annoying, and it gets stuck up a little bit. It used to be that 98, 95, Millennium, 2000, and all the previous operating systems used to really have to have all you drivers ready and have all your CD’s ready because you wouldn’t be able to do anything once you’ve installed Windows.

But now, with XP and Vista, typically, everything gets automatically installed ‑ at least the beta edition of the driver. And in most cases, unless you have an aftermarket video card like an ATI or an NVIDIA videocard (they’re [inaudible 2:58] the most common), a lot of times maybe network cards or wireless cards may not have drivers. For almost everything else, it always will. Drivers are what the computer needs. It’s the software that the computer uses to run the hardware. So, if you have a videocard, it needs to know how to use it, and that’s what the driver is all about ‑ it’s the software.

If it’s on a crashed system, this can be trickier because there’s a lot of options. Your Windows has crashed, and so once you run the setup, you can get the option where if you choose to install it in the same directory, and you’ll know what I’m talking about when you run it through the install, it will give you the option to delete current Windows installation and install fresh.

If a repair doesn’t work, this is probably the next best thing because you still have to reinstall your programs because it blows away the registry. All your files are still there. So you can delete existing Windows installation, install a fresh one through the Windows setup, and you don’t have to worry about backing up your files, or anything weird like that.

Not all of us have extra computers around, but the other alternative is taking the hard drive out, connecting it to a different computer, backing up all your files, and then putting it back in your computer and doing a fresh copy of Windows.

So, reinstalling Windows on a crashed system is more… [inaudible 4:32] information provided here is more so for people who don’t have an extra hard drive lying around, you can’t do it. If it’s a virus or a spyware issue, a lot of times what we all do is delete the current installation, and get Windows reinstalled; back up what I need to back up, and then format the system, just to give it a clean start.

It’s a little bit longer, but it’s safer. You make sure that you don’t have any virus problems or anything like that. When it comes to loading a fresh copy of Windows on a crashed system, it’s pretty basic here, it’s just like loading a fresh copy of Windows on the new computers. Sometimes you just have to cut [inaudible 5:12] it, and wipe the computer clean.

The one silver lining is that at least your computer will be back to its top performing levels, and be performing like the day you got it or sometimes even better. Sometimes you’re just at a total loss, and that situation is no good; but you just need to make the best of it, and reload a fresh copy of Windows.

Situations where these happen is where your computer is totally affected with viruses, and you can’t even run the Windows repair, or you can’t even delete the existing Windows installation.

As I’ve mentioned, two other good candidates for this is if you don’t care; if you don’t have any files, I would always recommend doing a fresh copy because why keep all that other garbage in your computer if you don’t need it. So if you don’t need anything backed up, and you have all your CDs and you have everything you need, just put a fresh copy on rather than deleting current Windows installation.

And also, at least from my standpoint, I like to reload a fresh copy of Windows twice a year. That’s probably more than the average person does it. Sometimes they do it more than that, but I like to get a clean slate.

Now, obviously I have the capacity to easily back everything up.