How do I safely wipe my computer clean?

[THORROMIG]

Bought a new E-machines desk top computer 4 years ago for 800bucks at Best Buy. After the 1st year the computer has given me nothing but problems, runs super slow, freezes, etc. I took it to Staples 2 years ago and had it reflashed and bought a windows 7 disk. How do I reflash or wipe clean my computer and redownload my windows 7 disk without having to pay anyone to do it? I downloaded free CC cleaner and ran that multiple times trying to clean anything up, also downloaded the free malewarebites download and ran that trying to clean things up. Can somebody please give me a tip to try to get this computer running half decent.

 

[simple_gifts]

Are you talking about reloading the OS when you say "redownload my windows 7 disk?"

The best way to guarantee a fresh install is to remove the partition information and let the windows installer create a new one and initialize the whole system. In my experience regardless of what you tell windows to do with existing partitions, the installer ignores you and does what it thinks will cause less damage.

To do this easily, with my limited windoze skills, would involve booting from a DVD or CDROM with some sort of recovery disk and remove the partitions that way. This is done easily with a linux CD.

Make sure you back up all you data (obviously?)

 

[Donald]

Its unclear what you want to actually do. If you save your personal data files you can then let a fresh Windows install partition and format the hard drive. You are then almost certain not to have any software issues at that point in time. You will then need to download all Windows updates. Then reinstall all programs you want to run and then copy your data files.

What you cannot do is to reinstall Windows without the install removing most of any installed programs.

If the computer is older sometimes its not worth going to the next level of the operating system. If may need more memory and you start putting good money after old. Newer computers run 64 bit versions of Windows, older computers may not have a 64 bit processor.

You really need to find out what is happening over time to slow it down. Virus? Malware? Too many tasks running? Tasks looping? Short on memory? Harddrive getting many errors that it recovers from but takes time to recover.

 

[mattwithcats]

My way is buy a new hard drive, remove the old one,
set it on a shelf,
install the new one,
boot from CD
then install Windows

Buy a cheap external hard drive case, usually under $20, if you need access to documents/music on the old one.

 

[Kuato]

Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
My way is buy a new hard drive, remove the old one,
set it on a shelf,
install the new one,
boot from CD
then install Windows

Buy a cheap external hard drive case, usually under $20, if you need access to documents/music on the old one.


That's super clean, Nice Idea Matt...and gets a hard drive upgrade at the same time.

 

[The_Eric]

Agreed.
Originally Posted By: Kuato
Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
My way is buy a new hard drive, remove the old one,
set it on a shelf,
install the new one,
boot from CD
then install Windows

Buy a cheap external hard drive case, usually under $20, if you need access to documents/music on the old one.


That's super clean, Nice Idea Matt...and gets a hard drive upgrade at the same time.

 

[sxg6]

A new hard drive is one option with how cheap hard drives are.

Another option if you want to save money, is to back up any important stuff you want to keep.
Figure out who makes your current hard drive, there are a few ways of doing this. I really like hirens boot cd, found here http://www.hirensbootcd.org/. I'll run one of the system information utilities on the disc and it will list the hard drive manufacturer there. You can also go to control panel, system, device manager, disk drives, and it might say your hard drive manufacturer, or hard drive model number, it varies. That's one of the reasons why I usually just pop in hirens boot disc and use their system info utilities, much more detailed information can be pulled from your pc.
After that, I would zero fill the entire hard drive using the hard drive manufacturers utility. Zero filling the hard drive is like reformatting, except better and more thorough.

After that is done, you should be all set and able to reinstall windows using the windows 7 cd.

*One more important thing to note, in my opinion. On hirens boot cd, there's a program called license crawler. This searches your pc and creates a list of programs like microsoft office, and provides you with the cd key that is on file in case you don't have the cd key anymore. So before you wipe your computer, it's important to make sure you have cd keys for any software you have purchased.

*I should also mention that sometimes running programs like malwarebytes in windows safe mode can find malware the had not been previously been found when running windows in normal mode. I've had some hard drives that were so badly infected that I ended up pulling the drive, and scanning it as an external drive on a different pc using something like malwarebytes. Once the operating system has been booted up, it can be very very hard to get rid of some of the malware.