Clean old computer for kids at school

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Clean old computer for kids at school

I have old computer with alot of junk on it have little to no free disk space on it and have tried several things to clean it out. My high school kids attend Independent Study for high school and a requirement is to have a computer with internet access.

Please how can I clean out computer to basically original state of purchase without having all installation CD's?


Re: Clean old computer for kids at school

If you dont have the "restore" CD that came with the computer or a Windows installation CD, you could uninstall all software that didnt come with the computer, one by one.

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Re: Clean old computer for kids at school
To freshen up or renew a computer where you do not want to retain old data (pictures, documents, user settings, bloated user temp directories, etc), you can create a new administrator account and use this account to delete the previous account.  To do this (I'm assuming you are using Windows XP), go to Start>Control Panel>User Accounts.  Find the option to create a new account and choose a name.  Be sure you make it an Administrator account and not a Limited.  Next, log off from the current account:  Start>Shutdown>Logoff.  Log on to the newly created account and go back to User Accounts and into the old account and pick the option to delete the account.  You will be given an option to save the user data from the account being deleted.  If you choose yes, the data will be saved to a folder on the new desktop. This will free up space but it will also be important to do what Hubby suggested and go to Control Panel>Add Remove Programs and uninstall old software that you remember installing but no longer need.  Be cautious about what you uninstall and uninstall only things you know you don't need. If it runs fast enough at this point and you have some breathing room on your hard drive, you are good to go. Many XP machines have a recovery partition (now pretty much standard) which is accessed by pressing a certain key during startup which will reinstall Windows and hardware drivers, making it like it was brand new way back when.  If you want to explore this option, do a Google search for your model with the added words "recovery partition" or "system recovery".  Search results will tell you if your computer was released with a recovery partition and how it is accessed.

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