[Rick Johnston]

As a typical home user, I was fed up with the bloat that accumulates over a period of months by incessant upgrades and security fixes that seem to bog down the machines until they're frustratingly unusable.

I'm no IT professional, but I've been around the block a few times over the past 25 years, learning WAY more than I ever wanted to know about com-pew-ters. More knowledgeable people than I can chime in here with additional info and tips (please!).

My computers get fresh installs at least once a year, and it usually takes about three hours. Here's a step-by-step for the latest wipe, which was performed on the oldest and slowest machine I own. The entire process is too much for me to write in one sitting, so it will be continued over several posts. Feel free to post comments.

The Machine:
The machine is a basic 2.3 gHz Intel with 512 of ram, circa 2003 or so. On-board video and sound. It's fine for my needs, which include basic surfing, e-mail, music, and some Youtube. Hard-wired to 1 meg DSL.

The Problem:
Over the past year I had allowed all of the programs to auto update. WinXP, Adobe, Java, Flash, Win Media Player and others were constantly pinging their home sites, causing extreme slowdowns.

The machine became so bloated that it took nearly three minutes to cold boot and 15 or 20 seconds to launch each program. Internet speed tests on several sites showed that my 1-meg DSL was being cut to less than 500kbps. Youtubes had to be paused until at least half of a video was downloaded before I could play them through without glitches.

In July I downloaded Firefox, which solved some of the speed problems. I liked it better than IE so I also installed it on the other two machines in my house. Everything was cool until, a week later, WinXP did an "upgrade" that negated that increased speed. (This happened at exactly the same time on all three machines in my house. Hmmm ...)

I applied every trick I knew -- and some I found by searching -- to increase response: Disable unnecessary services. Edit System Config to prevent unneeded apps from starting. Clean the registry. Stop programs from auto-updating. But it was too late. The machine was too bloated.

Backups:
My weekly backup ritual is fairly bulletproof: All my stuff is stored on two internal hard drives under two master folders: Data and Media. I drag 'n' drop these folders (plus my Bookmarks and e-mail profile & address book) to one of two 340-gig USB drives that rotate every week between home and work.

The Data folder includes a subfolder called "Sources" to which I've copied all of my progam CDs, serial numbers, motherboard drivers, printer drivers, and anything else the computer needs. Firefox and other downloaded program files are also kept there.

More Ram:
It was relatively painless to toss in another 1-gig of ram ($25 from Newegg), so I did this just before I wiped the drive. After I rebooted to verify that the machine recognized the ram, I shut down.

Wiping the Drive:
I shut off the modem, inserted the WinXP CD into the drive, and turned on the machine. I let Windows do its thing for an hour or so, which included formatting the C drive.

Initializing the Install:
When the install was finished, it tried to get on the net to do its upgrades. I had turned off the modem so it couldn't find a connection. I then plugged in the USB drive and loaded the motherboard drivers and XP SP3.