Recently my PC has become creepy-crawly slow! I have decided to reinstall windows Me which came with me Dell machine from scartch. As I think this is not a full installation CD (as it is common these days with many vendors) I wanted to see what the best way of doing this would be. I have tried in the past to just patch and mend the same OS but the speed problem was not solved. If I wanna do this from scratch which will reomve all the files and applications and give me a fresh OS with no other stuff on the machine, what whould I do? Thank you very much for your help, cheers sean

Dell like other vendors have hidden partitions, therefore phone DELL for advice or buy a proper copy of ME

If you are lucky, that may be a recovery CD. Did you get a floppy recovery disk with it as well, some vendors do, needing the floppy to start recovery process because some system files are placed on the hard disk in FAT12 format. Packard Bell definately do. If not. Search you recovery disc and see if there is a file on it to format and reload windows. Sometimes there is - dont know about DEll though. If you are unlucky on both these points then you will have to obtain a full copy of ME to reload.

thanks folks! I have now narrowed down the problem to this: I need to boot to dos from me. ctrl or f8 only bring me to 4 win loading options and no option on dos prompt. what do you suggest? soneone said I need a win. 98 bood diskette, is that the only way?

its prob the best way, if it will work this way. get a 98 or ME boot disk from www.bootdisk.com.

done some research. Manufacturers include a recovery disk to reload windows, which i assume is what you have. But they dont include the original software. These disks load a programme that accesses a copy of windows that is stored on your hard disk. So you should be able to load "basic windows" from this disk, though you will lose any other programmes that came installed on your comp when you got it.