Over the years, my comp has gathered useless stuff (even within my registry and wherever else) that I think is slowing down my comp. What I want to do is totally wipe out everything on my HD and reinstall Win98SE so it's like I just bought a new computer. I have all my program CDs like microsoft office so I can reinstall all the programs I want myself. I'm sure it'll be a lot harder than just reformating my HD. What is the easiest, most painless way to clean the slate?

First, and most important, make sure you have at least one (more is safer) floppies that will boot and are able to access your CDrom drive. Boot this floppy and type format C: to wipe everything off your hard drive. Then start the setup program on your cdrom drive to install win98 With the easy part over, you can then start re-installing all your software.

Thank you very much for the responce. However, od you or somebody out there know of perhaps a web site or something that give detailed instructions on this process. I do admit that since I'm willing to totally wipe my HD, there isn't any important things that I will loose if something goes bad, but I'd like to still use my computer afterwards and not want some trouble to pop up in the middle of the process. One problem I have right now is that I don't think I have a boot up disk. How would I get one? Thanks again.

It doesn't GET any simpler than boomer explained. You can MAKE a startup disk yourself by going to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, then click on the Startup Disk tab, follow the instructions. As boomer suggested, it's a good idea to make 2 copies, in case one doesn't work correctly. Good luck.

once you make the bootup disk, boot from it and make sure you can see your cdrom drive. If you can see the drive then go for it.

I think I have a problem similar and need to wipe the slate clean and start over, I do have the win98 cd and several start up disks. What has been happening is I tried to overwrite the win98 program using the win98 disk and I only have a 1 gn hard drive in the PC. I thought that Win98 would overwrite the previous one and now I have two of them on the drive, when I tried to overwrite the third time it failed suddenly and got a bunch of rows of dots on the screen with the curser flashing in upper left corner. indicating that perhaps the hard drive got messed up.. I ran scandisk and it fixed a lot of stuff, but now I can't load up Win98 again. My hard drive is almost used up.. I have no programs on there that I need and have saved the stuff I needed on floppies. I too, want to start over with a clean slate, should I just go ahead and Fdisk?

Just read response number 1 above.