BleepingComputer.com: Format & reinstall XP Pro, Office 2007 etc on custom PC

My work computer was built 7 or 8 years ago, by a shop that has since closed. It's showing it's age but still works pretty well so although I'm getting a new "main" computer, I want to keep this one for our other office. I've never formatted a computer but understand that should get rid of alot of accumulated "junk" slowing down my old one.
I'll save my documents, desktop, emails, calendar and contacts to an external hard drive. Should I save anything else?
I have my installation cd's for XP Pro, Office, monitor, printers etc and license numbers for programs downloaded online so reinstalling those should be okay.
What about the other components? Will Windows recognize and install drivers for the motherboard, cd burner, speakers and whatever else? I do have floppies (yes, it's that old) for some stuff but I'm not sure I have everything.

It would help if you were to post the specs for this computer.

What is the make and model of the motherboard?

Are you using integrated audio or graphics, or are there dedicated cards?

The only driver I can tell for sure that you will need will be the chipset drivers.

Minimally you should download a network/modem driver, motherboard chipset driver, and video driver. Put them on a CD or USB Drive.

Your mouse and keyboard should work with default windows drivers.

That way you can at least get online and find the rest of the drivers you're missing without needing two computers.

I'm not sure if this is the info you need, I've saved just about everything that came with the computer, so here goes:
It has a ASUS P4B motherboard, which I do have the cd for. I also have a floppy for a Lava Parallel-PCI bus enhanced port, a cd for a VGA Driver for an Nvidia GeForce, and a floppy for a CD-RW Device Driver which I assume is for the Lite-on, drive "E."
I have a BOKA speaker system, which really doesn't matter much cuz I haven't had sound for about a year. Does that help? What other specs are needed?

It looks like you have the drivers that you need.

Most optical devices are plug and play, they use drivers that are native to the operating system, so it's curious that you would have a CD with drivers for it.

You might think about wiping the hdd rather than reformatting it. A reformat will only affect the parts of the hdd that data has been stored on, where as wiping the hdd overwrites the entire hdd. This basically will leave you with a fresh slate to work with.

There's a program that I've used for several year call WipeDrive. If you are interested you can download it here.

This post has been edited by dc3: 06 October 2010 - 12:34 AM

dc3, on Oct 6 2010, 12:27 AM, said:

Might only be a version of Nero or perhaps Lite-Scribe burning software.

ThunderZ, on Oct 5 2010, 11:30 PM, said:

I know that there are some optical drives that have been out there for a while that came with firmware. But they also came with burning software like Nero, so you may be correct. Or we both may be correct.

dc3, on Oct 6 2010, 03:27 PM, said:

That would be my recommendation also. Here are a couple of other (free) programs that will wipe the hard drive:

dban http://www.dban.org/download

killdisk http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

dc3, on Oct 6 2010, 01:42 AM, said:

or not.

Thank you everyone! I'm going to save the files what I want, which is probably more than I need, on my external hard drive and use one of the programs suggested to wipe the hard drive. I thought I'd install the motherboard first, is there a certain order I should use for the rest of it?
Let me know, I'm kinda excited about giving this a try!

As long as you don't have an OEM (HP, Lenovo, etc.) system, the install should be straightforward.

After the install is done, the order of installing drivers, etc. is a personal choice. The Windows firewall is on by default as long as I am using a CD with at least SP2.

I make sure that I install the networking drivers first, since PA is the priority for me when I do a clean install.

Then...critical updates...then whatever.

Louis