Completely clearing PC's harddrive?

[Whigga Spitta]

Hello all. I am by no means a computer expert, as I always feel inclined to say. Since switching to Mac OS X, my Windows machine in my room has been collecting dust. And apperantly, while it's been off, it's been collecting other things too. Namely something named "actulice" at startup, and many many pop-ups when IE is started, even while using Spybot Search & Destroy. The thing is, my dad tried to use it today, and found the internet to be unresponsive. He's threatening to stop paying for DSL if I can't get this P.O.S. to work.
I'm going to be gone at college next year, so it's really not that huge of a deal, but my mom and my sister like to use the internet at home, so i would hate to see it go. I don't have alot of free time to try and get this piece of junk to work, so my quick question is....
CAN I DO SOMETHING TO THE HARDDRIVE TO MAKE IT BELIEVE THE COMPUTER IS BRAND NEW?

 

[JzzTrump22]

The only way i see to do that is to reformat. Which is time consuming, especially for Windows 98. If you have XP it's not too bad.

 

[Whigga Spitta]

thankfully it is running XP (wow, thats hardly something to be thankful for) so I'll look for some information about how to go about reformatting it. thanks for your quick response!

 

[slowtreme]

http://housecall.trendmicro.com

go there, scan your HD and get your viruses clean.

Get a virus scanner and adaware, spybot is shabby and useless for viruses.

 

[davecuse]

thankfully it is running XP (wow, thats hardly something to be thankful for) so I'll look for some information about how to go about reformatting it. thanks for your quick response!

If you want to get rid of all the pop ups and everything go to Start>Run type in MSCONFIG click Selective Startup and uncheck Load Startup Items then click OK and reboot

This should prevent most of the current crap from loading, once you are here, download FireFox from http://mozilla.org/ to prevent future crap from loading, and cease and desist on all IE action.

I see this type of thing everyday in Tech Support land, and msconfig will prevent 95% of crap from loading, some spyware uses some dirty registry tricks to load automatically, but FireFox should make you pretty secure.

If you still have problems just pop in the WinXP CD and erase the current partitions then reformat and install, but this is extreme and you shouldn't really need to reformat.