how do you go about re-installing windows?

Question

my dad needs to do it cause i screwed up my computer and i want to know what he's gonna do with it and how long it's going to take.

Answer 1

If you can, I'd back up documents or files that are important to you first. Secondly you should try to get the necessary drivers for your computer, because windows some, but not all the drivers needed to run your computer such as your sound, and video drivers. Most of the time, drivers are located on a CD that came with your computer. If that's not available, you'll either have try to download them from manufacturers website with computer in its current condition or bite the bullet and reinstall windows and install a the drivers from the cd or try to download them if you can.

Now you can reinstall windows, which most of the time can be done by booting the computer through the cd-rom. Depending on how your computer is setup, you may need to change the boot order so that it detects the cd in the drive and boots from it. This is done by going into the BIOS which you can access by pressing keys like (DEL, F12, F2) at boot, but this may vary on you computer manufacture, those are common keys.

From this point forward it is self explanatory, and it will likely give you the option to repair or upgrade your current installation, which I'd recommend before starting all from scratch. It may take an hour or more, it is relative to how fast and what stuff you're running on the computer

Answer 2

There are some pretty good answers above here.

There are a million different possibilities, including some fixes that are much much simpler than re-installing Windows.

But ... , some people think you should re-install Windows every couple years, if you are a fairly heavy user. Why? The system usually will run much better and faster.

Steps involved:
1) Collect all of the disks that came with the new computer.
2) Backup all important user documents and files.
3) Re-boot with the Windows CD-Rom in the drive.
4) Re-format the entire hard disk. (This should be a "high level" format and not a "low level" format.)
5) Install Windows, & any special hardware drivers.
6) Install all of your third party software.
7) Restore you user documents and files.

Answer 3

well first if there is any important documents or data that you don't want to lose, used a external hard drive or a USB Thumb drive, depending on how many files we are dealing here you might want to get a higher gig of space to hold all your files...,if you have a recovery disk it you won't loss anything but if you don't just save what you want and then reinstall windows...it will take a few minutes after the installation of windows make sure you install all the drivers for your main board or motherboard and any adapter cards such as modem, sound, video, etc...to check which drivers you need you need to right -click on my computer and select properties and a windows should pop up then click on the hardware tab and select device manager there it should give you a whole list of all your hardware on your computer...hope this helps out in some way...

Answer 4

If you need to ask how your dad should go about reinstalling windows, he probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place but dad's will be dad's. =) What do you mean by "screwed up", there are plenty of ways to fix an operating system besides a complete reinstall such as an OS repair from the system disk, or by cleaning up unnecessary files/programs. I would have him try that first, it would give him a little more experience, and maybe he can even show you how to maintain a clean computer. Good Luck.

Answer 5

He needs to rebute the computer that means that he will lose all the data on the computer and clear the whole system(move things u want to keep off the computer somewhere like a usb stick or somthing and the he will need to use cds to install it again, every program u currently got on will be lost and u will need to reinstall the lot so it may take a day or 2

Answer 6

depends on how he's going about it. Sure hope for your sake he's going to safe your documents and files.
If he has a CD with XP and SP2 slipstreamed in it, installation won't take more then a couple of hours. If he has to download all updates and SP2, it'll be quite a bit longer.
Either way, when he's done make sure you thank him for repairing your screw-up :)

Answer 7

Insert the CD and if it doesn't start up it self. Click my computer and and click to run it.

Answer 8

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316941/en-us