HOW CAN I CLEAN UP A HARD DRIVE WITH OUT FORMATTING? 1

[gearhead03]

I am helping a freind of mine. She has had this computer for a while. It was purchased second hand. It is running windows 98. It has gotten a bunch of extra garbage on it and runs extremely slow. I want to strip it down to just windows. I do not have the windows disk with a valid registration key. I want to know if there is a utility out there to delete everything except just windows. Or if there is a process to do this. I have windows disks but i do not want to use my registration key because of copyright issues.
Thank You

 

[1101001100110101]

First I would go to add/remove programs and unistall anything you dont need. Next you can run disk cleanup in your system tools and it will delete more un nessary files. Last you can use a program like ace utilites

http://www.acelogix.com/

to clean up all the files left that windows didnt get rid of. It is allways good to make a backup of your regisrty just in case.

 

[2cornflakes]

faq615-3144

http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder.shtml

 

[TekTippy4U]

Orig. MS RegClean 4.1a (free)

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=458

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[wolluf]

If your friend has a licence for 98, there's no issue using your key (and as posted above, you can retrieve her key).

IMO its a waste of time trying to remove stuff to get 98 running properly - you need to backup, wipe and reinstall.

 

[hotfusion]

And when you have a stable re-installed operating system running, with all drivers, just the core software installed and set up as you like, create an image of it and save this on another partition or a CD-R. When the system gets bogged down again, as it surly will, simply re-instate the image AFTER BACKING UP to set the system right back to how it was initially.
A good program for doing this, and one I've used a lot is Savepart, and it can be found for free here:

http://perso.club-internet.fr/guiboure/en

Regards, Andy.
**************************************
My primitive attempts at designing a private web site can be laughed at here:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/andyspatch

 

[TekTippy4U]

Would anyone care to explain the possible issues/conflicts that will appear when trying to use Windows Update and such....especially with a different version of software that although the Product ID can be changed to match....the other components have their own (possible OEM)numbers.

In other words, It's not ONLY the Product ID that's different when swapping OEM/Retail/Update versions.
Thank you

Oh, and beware if your using a Compaq/IBM/HP

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[SkipCox]

TT4U,

I haven't experienced a MS update problem with 95, 95b, 98, 98se, Me, Office 97Pro or Office 2000Pro. I often get machines with lost disks and just dig out the keys from the registry and do the install with my disks.

After the install, I just go to the update site (or burned cd) and install all the updates.

So far, so good.

Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~skip9/index.html

http://scc.i8.com

 

[TekTippy4U]

Thanx for the reply SkipCox;
I was curious if you're able to follow up and see if the updates cause some problems, cause I'm sure you don't keep ALL these machines...and the problems usually come later, down the road...MS has that "newer" update site and thinking about what i've been hearing concerning the "XP Hardware Registration" thing made me concerned, ya know.....though I, like you, will continue to stick with older OSs for awhile, and ...it's nice to know anyways..thanks again

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.