I have been asked to format and reinstall Windows XP Home on a colleagues laptop which he has recently purchased against my advice considering the poor specifications. It has a processor of less than 900GHZ, a HDD of 10GB, and its showing only 120MB of memory and assume the graphics card is utilizing the missing 8MB's.
The speed of the thing is as you would expect, even after reducing the msconfig/startup entries to a minimum and removing most of the programs installed and have told him not to spend anymore money on something that would take pride in his young daughters room for her to practice on!
The only discs he has been given apart from software are the an Application & Support CD which has Drivers and a few application tools along with a Medion Product Recovery CD which I can boot from and gone partially through the re-installation of windows.
I would prefer to wipe the HDD and start over but a little unsure when I'm asked about the partition side of the process and how to go about things.
I should add that he only wants it for internet access and have installed a Vodafone 3G datacard which works very well, but the laptop as a whole is very, very slow when I leave the included McAfee security suite on for protection and the whole machine grinds to an embarrassing crawl. Uninstalling McAfee and installing AVG free antivirus allows it to run a little quicker and even bootup in around 4 minutes as against 7minutes but as soon as I install ZoneAlarm for the firewall protection, it crawls again. At present it is using the Microsoft Firewall to speed things up and am fully aware of its inadequacies.
Any help much appreciated on the format side and appreciate the memory issue in my opinion is obviously the stumbling block.
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