1. Get your Windows XP installation disk. If you don't know where is or never had one, borrow one from a friend. Whether you are using XP Professional or Home you can use any XP installation disk to do this. You will not be asked for CD key or affect activation.

2. Boot from the CD.
a. You may need to go in your BIOS Setup to change to boot from the CD before harddrive. To make the change you will press the key it tells you to press when you turn computer on for SETUP. If it does not just try pressing ESC, F1, F2, F10 and delete receptively right after you press the power button and you should land in Setup.
b. You probably will see a message on the screen as you are booting to press any key to boot from CD. Do that.

3. You will see a light blue screen and a number of items mentioned being installed that may sound like a foreign language.

4. It will stop on a screen asking if you want to Install windows XP or Recovery console. Press R (can be upper or lower case R).

5. It will ask which installation of Windows do you want to install and probably offer only one choice. CAUTION. Just press the number for the installation, which is 1 if only one listed, if more than 1 listed it is probably 1 you use also. Do not press ENTER. (If you press enter you are back at step 2, don't worry I have made this mistake many times)

6. You will now land a DOS prompt (looks like C:>)

7 Type CHKDSK /R (can be upper or lower case, but the space between K and / is critical) and press ENTER

8. It will run a while (could be 30 minutes or more and then returns to prompt. may say errors found and fixed and may said it was ok, but either way actually probably fixed your problem.)

9. Type EXIT and press ENTER.

10. Allow it to do normal Bootup (startup and it should start working).

11. Now clean any spyware off your machine. I would suggest getting AVG (the free copy at free.grisoft.com) will be fine and Super Antispyware (available free at www.superantispyware.com) and install both and updates and run both. Then every few weeks run both. AVG will get most spyware and viruses, but superantispyware catches and cleans some AVG misses. I like Norton to get viruses but does not do well on spyware.

Dwight

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