How to Reinstall Windows XP

Video Transcript

"Hi we are going to be talking about how to reinstall Windows XP. To get started, you obviously need a machine and a legal copy of Windows XP. Legal copy means either a volume license copy or a OEM provided version. And typically when you receive a machine, there will be a authenticity sticker on the bottom of the machine. So it's very important that you use a legal copy. So in order to reinstall, the first thing you need to do is insert your disc into the machine which I've already done and let it boot to the disc. Now some machines won't boot to the CD by default, on those particular machines you'll just have to look at the documentation on what key sequence to press to either change the BIOS so it books first to CD or to bring up a boot menu. So with that in mind, let's get started. So here we are at the first action screen of the Windows XP re-installation. So as you can see it gives you the prompt and it's very simple, it says to setup XP now press ENTER which we want to do. So we press ENTER and it looks and finds our disc then it prompts you with an EULA agreement, if you don't know what it says, it basically means don't bootleg our system. So you can press F8 to accept that. And then it finds your disc that already has Windows on it. So in this instance we want to do a complete re-installation so we're going to delete this by pressed D, actually by pressing ESC. Then we're going to press D to delete the partition then ENTER to confirm it and L to say yes, we're really, really sure we want to delete this partition. So then you see you have your own partition space. Now if you decide that you want to setup a limited partition for your operating system and you want to have a second drive that you can use for MP3 files or video files or just other data storage, then by all means you can press C at this point to create a new partition. But for the sake of ease we're just going to say we're going to use the entire partition. And I would recommend using a quick file system format which is what this is right here, you either the quick or a non-quick. Quick will generally save you a few extra minutes. And in terms of the actual setup, that's all there is to it. It will format your drive, it will copy your files and then your system will reboot. When it reboots it will complete the installation process prompting you a few times but the prompts are very self explanatory so I don't feel the need to cover that in this segment. But if you do have questions, there are plenty of resources out there."