This part is supposed to be the easy part, but can sometimes be of a lot of trouble for some people. When Windows first starts up, the first thing you should do is install drivers for your hardware. Windows was made a long time ago, at least in PC years, so a lot of newer hardware that was developed after Windows was developed won't work properly, or won't work at all; therefore, you have to download and install third-party drivers to get those pieces of hardware working properly.

For example, your video card might not be working properly, as you're seeing Windows through only 640x480 and with only 16 colors. Download drivers from the manufacturer's web site and install them. This process can be as easy as downloading an EXE file and double clicking on it, or as complex as you having to download a zip compression utility first (such as Winzip) and then having to manually update the drivers. The latter is the more complex, so I'll explain how to do that.

Click here to download Winzip 8, the most current version up to this date of my favourite zip utility. Once that's installed, download the drivers from the manufacturer's web site and unzip (or Extract) the files into a temporary directory, making sure you remembered which directory it is. Go to the Display control panel and go to the Settings tab. Click on the Advanced button, make sure you're on the Adapter tab and click on the Change... button. This will take you through the process of installing new drivers for your hardware. Run through the wizard, stating that you want to Specify the location of the driver and then use the Display a list of drivers... setting. Navigate to where you extracted those files and pick the file to install the drivers (usually, there will only be 1 file that you can choose in the directory) and finish the wizard. Reboot the computer and your graphics should be working properly.

One good habit to get into is to install as many drivers as you can possibly install, even if the hardware seems to be working properly already using the default Windows drivers. Newer drivers have usually never hurt anyone (with the occasional few that might do some damage), and will usually boost performance (sometimes a by a lot), help to increase system stability or will just help to eliminate any problems you might face in the future.

Now that the drivers are taken care of, you should also enable DMA for your hard drives as Windows doesn't enable them by default. By enabling DMA, the transfer speed of your hard drives, usually the newer and faster ones, will increase substantially. Make sure that your motherboard and hard drive both actually supports DMA-usually post-Pentium (P5) motherboards will support DMA-or else your computer will get screwed up. To enable DMA, go to the Device Manager and find any hard drives listed under the tree. Click on the Properties button and make your way to the Settings tab. In there, just check the DMA checkbox, click OK and reboot your computer.

Now that Windows is properly configured to your liking, just install your programs back onto your hard drive and restore those files that you backed up before. Some programs you can copy the files back right after the program is installed, while others require you to run through a configuration process before you can restore files. Either way, you should make sure that the program is not running before you copy anything into the program directory to help eliminate any problems.

On to: Conclusion