Viewing Thread:
"Delete everything and reinstall from scratch - how?"

Just rescued an old PC from the attic. It had lots of spyware on at one time, then must have been infected with a virus, it can boot up and start then is frozen with an illegal operation or something mmtask or missing rundll I dunno. Tried to reinstall windows these missing files or corrupted files stopped me at the end of setup.

Just tried looking for a website to wipe everything and install fresh, cant seem to find one. I tried it before on another computer but I can't remember how to do it. Does anyone know or could direct me to the information I need. Thank you

I got mine from Office World, they cost about £199 each (x4) and the monitor shelves about £149 each (x3). Even with the biggest CRT monitor I have more than enough room. But then people tend to have small bedrooms/office so they might not fit.

Prices maybe different now this was 2 or 3 years ago, might be better and cheaper now

MFI used to do some good ones, havent been in for ages though.

Talking of desks, anyone know any good computer desk shops? Or computing storage?

(Other than IKEA.)

Damarus wrote:
> (Which usually allows cd boot).

Erm, i dont think it does. AFAIK WinXP was the first microsoft OS to allow you to boot from the cd.

Hello, thank you very much for your help, advise and for the warnings. Very appreciated indeed.

I managed to do it and everything is working fine, I even fixed a laptop that suffered a similiar problem. Though as first it had trouble formating C:

Luckily I had a boot disk ready from installing windows on my other PC. Not sure whether I could have done it with just the CDRom but I used the boot disk just in case. Then went on with CDRom support. I did have one problem trying to install Windows ME, it allows you to install in full (despite being an upgrade) as long as half way through you prove that you do own Windows 98. However the CDRom drive wouldnt recognise the Win98 disk, so I installed that first then WinME.

Everything is perfect and running smoothly. I now have 2 PCs and one laptop (inbetween them) facing me at my desk. Kinda weird with all these computer screens around me. Now I can watch a movie on one and surf the net on another, the third umm porn maybe? *grin* my brother suggested watching 3 DVDs at once, I'll get round to that one day, but I'm sure I'll have a tough time following them all.

That makes 4 PCs running FAD and I should be buying another 2, more powerful computers (for my work) in the next month or so. Luckily years ago I changed my bedroom into an office and have 4 giant desks with monitor shelves so I pretty much have room for 8 PCs and 4 laptops with plenty or room to have a nice LAN party with my friends.

So thank you very much for your help and your time. Cheers guys.

cookie monster wrote:
> Hmmm, i done a search to check and this guy thinks otherwise.
>
> [URL]http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winme_install.asp[/URL]

I'd hate to ruin your geniusm, but his ME is only an upgrade therefore he'd have to install Win 98 first anyway (Which usually allows cd boot).

gamesfreak wrote:
> Yeah but, like you said, it's a company license copy.
>
> Nearly all home edition/proffesional edition CD's that I have used
> boot straight from the CD OK.

Yeah, just pointing out it's a possibility that he'd need one.
I'd hate to take advice, remove a partition, reformat then discover that I needed a boot disk. I'd be a little peeved.

Golden rule, check whether you can boot from CDrom before doing *anything* that you might regret.

:D

<<<<<< Retard alert

I never actually read the original post, didn't realise he had ME and not XP.

You probably do need a boot disc then....

gamesfreak wrote:
> Nope
>
> You just go into the BIOS, change the 1st boot device to CDROM, then
> shove the CD in and restart.

Hmmm, i done a search to check and this guy thinks otherwise.

[URL]http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winme_install.asp[/URL]