ryan93 wrote:
I just want to erase everything off my PC, except for the operating system. How do I do it? I don't think I have the boot disk for my PC (Dell, Vista), although I might have one for my laptop (Packard Bell, Windows 7).
If you are using some version of Windows, under start button->control panel, there is usually an add/remove software feature. Use that to remove as many programs you don't want as you can. Be careful not to remove drivers, or any program your computer needs.
If you don't have an idea of what it does, don't remove it.
After you have done this, you can remove other programs by going to their listing under the star button->all programs, or program files, and seeing if there is an uninstall option listed for that particular program.
After this, go into windows explorer. You can usually get to this by right clicking on the start button. Navigate to the root directory. On most computers this is the C:\ drive. Windows installs most programs in the directory Program Files. You can look in the folder of each program for an uninstall shell which will uninstall the program. Some programs don't have them, in which case you can simply highlight their program folder, and delete it manually.
The downside to deleting programs manually is sometimes it won't let you delete certain files, or other times, fragments of the program will still exist in other files or in the Windows registry, so the program isn't completely gone.
After you are done deleting things manually, you usually have to empty the recycling bin. Before you do any of this, I suggest you set a system restore point in case you royally screw something up.
In the future, it's advisable to install your operating system on one disk and your programs on a different disk, or if you only have one disk, partition it into two partitions, one for your operating system and one for your programs. If you had done this you could just format the disk or partition your programs are stored on.
18 Mar 2011, 10:03 pm
