I'm selling my computer soon, and I want to get rid of everything except for the OS. Kind of like taking it back to when it was new, right after installing windows 2000. Whats the best way to go about doing this? What exactly does formatting do?

 

Reloading your Windows program will do exactly what you just said. It will bring your computer back to exactly the way it was when you brought it home. By reformatting (you'll do this when you reload Windows), you are basically erasing absolutely everything that is on the hard drive and putting the Windows program back on the way it was at the very beginning. If you have stuff on the hard drive that you have accumulated through the months and years that is of importance to you, you should back them up (copy them onto a CD) before you reformat. Some people have a second hard drive just for storage of "newly acquired" and saved stuff. If you do, then you can just remove the second hard drive and put it into your computer.
Sorry, you do have the Windows "restore" disc, right? You need this.

 

Thanks for the explanation. When i bought my computer I unistalled windows XP, and installed windows 2000. I only have the windows xp reinstallation cd (is that the same as the "restore" cd?). Can i reinstall using the windows XP cd, if the OS i am using is windows 2000?

 

OK, now you're gonna need a "real" computer guy to help you out here. My colleague here at work has two operating systems on his home computer and it makes things a bit different and difficult to deal with so I'm going to bow out of this one and let someone who knows more step up to the plate and help you.

 

when you go to reinstall XP, if that's what you are selling it with, or even Windows 2000, during the installation process it will ask you if you would like to reformat the drive, or leave it as is.

Best tip - remove the partition entirely and then create the partition that it will be installed upon. Just use FAT32 for ease of use and make it one big drive. Then install on that partition.

This will, or rather, should, erase all of your data while installing the OS. HOWEVER, sometimes, it doesn't, if the partition size and file size is exactly the same, windows kinda flakes and doesn't really erase much - but I haven't seen that kind of behaviour since... the NT days.