I have 9yr old Dell computer w/Win98SE. It has one additional memory upgrade and an additional hard drive. I have many programs on this machine and thousands of files. Is there as easy way to clean it all up so that I can give this machine to my daughter having nothing but the factory installed programs onboard?

Did you buy this Dell New ? If so, do you have the recovery disk for it ? In order to get it back to factory specks, you will have too either use the recovery disk or wipe it, then installing a fresh copy of Windows 98 ..

Thanks for reply. Yes I bought the computer new and have the Win98 and recovery discs. Should I actually perform a hardrive format? Haven't done that in many years - wonder if there are straight forward instructions available. I guess I would have to perform the same re-format on both the original and addon hardrives?

Here is a link to a pretty good Tutorial for setting up a Win98 System. http://www.onecomputerguy.com/insta... There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

Come back here if you get any problems. Make sure you have a product key for the W98 CD. If you have a floppy drive on board it will help. Make yourself a startup disk (floppy) using the facility provided within W98 before you start. Another way forward is to uninstall the unecessary programs (from Control Panel/Add-Remove) then delete any personal files which are not part of any install. Whatever you do, don't just delete any old files if you should decide to cleanup without reformat. some other bloke...

Thank you all for the help. Will come back when the job is done with success story or questions for problems. Thanks again.

A hardrive format would be secondary to a full wipe using a zero write utility like disktool's erase feature. Then the recovery disk should be able to set up the hard drive(s) for the Win98 reinstallation just like when it was new... Lee