Reformatting Question (1 Viewer)

[Mathew Shelby]

I cannot find my original Windows 2000 discs and my computer has been getting slower and slower recently. So my question is: Can I reformat my hard drive to clean everything off and leave the operating system in place? Then I guess my next question would be: How do you do this? And please, treat me like a child when you explain it to me. I may know a little about home theater, but I know even less about computers.

 

[Scott Graham]

You can't format your HDD and leave the OS untouched. First off I would try running "chkdsk /f" from a command prompt, then run defrag. It's possible it's slowing down because your HDD is fragmented.

 

[Ted Lee]

i'll second the defrag option.

1. double-click "my computer"
2. right-click "C" drive - go to properties
3. click the "tools" tab
4. click the "defragment now" button

be aware that if you haven't done this before, it may take quite some time (could literally be hours) depending on how fast your pc is and how bad the fragmentation is.

on a side note, what disk defrag does is put all your files together into one "continuous" section. over time, your hard drive "moves" stuff around and can "split" your files. then, when the pc tries to access these split files, it has to hunt all over the place to find them.

 

[Scott Graham]

BTW.. make sure your screen saver is off, and try not to use your PC much during the defrag process. Defrag will continually restart from either of these.

 

[Mathew Shelby]

Thanks guys for the tips. I will try that later tonite.