Solved Reinstall XP

At a friend's an his PC was virused. Completed several steps and the PC is supposedly clean. However, its very slow to boot and seems to struggle in general. My question is how hard is it to do a clean install of XP? From what I've read it seems easy but are there certain choices I'm going to be asked and have to make in any of the steps of the reinstall process that aren't so obvious.

Thanks all.

VFN

With April 8th being the day Microsoft stops issuing security updates for Xp I suppose the wisest thing my friend can do is get a new OS or a new PC.

An upgrade may not be possible, depending on the specs of the PC.

Going from XP to Windows 8 is bound to give rise to a certain amount of culture-shock, which the owner is going to have to get through before getting the best out of a new PC.

The good news about that is that it's actually easier to maintain a Win8 machine than XP. The bad new is that when it goes wrong, it can be difficult to fix without using one of the recovery options (which is what MS want you to do anyhow).

A clean install of XP is not really much harder than either Vista or Win7 - but needs a certain amount of preparation.

Is the machine from a big manufacturer? Does the OP still have the Recovery media for the machine (or can they create them from the Recovery partition)?

Whatever they decide, they'll need to do a backup of all their data to external media first - as they should already have done (but most of us don't - me included!)

It's a Dell and my friend has all the discs needed to reinstall.

How about a repair of XP. I was reading that that's an option but don't know much about it.

Is Windows 8 or 8.1 good for the average user? I've heard some people hate it.

Thanks.

VFN

It's many years since I did a repair install on XP - and if the machine in question has been kept up-to-date there's the problem of creating a disk with SP3 embedded as well.
A repair install also won't get rid of malware.

Windows 8/8.x is a definite culture-shock, but there is nothing wrong with it. The ones who protest most about it are the people who don't use it much, and who tend to be geeky about things anyhow. The average user will complain for the first week, and then find out how it works and discover its benefits, and utilise them (and ignore the stuff they don't need).
The OS was designed for Joe Punter - not for us geeks - and so does what Joe wants very well, although it does have some foibles. When it was first released, (before the anti-geek stuff was fully realised) people were saying that Apple was jealous and having to play catch-up now.

Thanks. I think my friend will probably buy a new tower with 8.