by Red Bull

Created on: March 06, 2009

There are many reasons why you might want to reformat your computer.

The most common reason is because you no longer can have your operating syste running smothly. Most of the times Windows will wear out just by itself. This is because of the way it was designed. Thanks to the way it was written and also thanks to it's complexity, you can be sure that plus than 60 million of lines of code must have some errors and bugs along the way even with the decades of experience Microsoft has. As you can imagine such errors can only be repaired when you reinstall the operating system again in a 100% clean hard disk.

That was the first reason.

The second reason why people reformat their computers is because they need to change the format of it mostly FAT to NTFS or the versa or it because they either prefer it or because they can have more disk space because of the cluster size. A single cluster can have only one file leaving a lot of holes in the disk is the cluster is too big. This is one good reason why people split their hard drives in two too.

To reformat your computer you should first backup all the files you keep in your computer and also the ones you find most important. The external hard drive or the USB PEN Drive are the fastest and the best options. If you have a super fast internet connection you might want to try Mozy but this is many times slower specially when you have several GB of data you need to transfer.

Then you must insert Windows operating system CD inside the CD-ROM drive. This thing will start and has a start up program inside it that is read only so there is no problem of needing to write anything. That's what the RAM is for.

Choose to format the hard disk and then to pick the wiset format either the FAT 32 not the 16! Or even the NTFS. The later one is more secure because it allows file encryption and compression. However if you want true compresison or encryption you know you can't just rely on Windows default tools like most people wrongly do it.

Then once you create the partition you should never split your hard disk in two because it will just eat a lot of space because any drive with less than 10 GB will run two times slower and this way your hard disk will have 20GB of useless space. This is not saving space because of cluster size, it's just wasting more space!

Finally you can now insert your Norton Ghost CD and have the computer like you had it before.

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