Well, here we are. After hours or even days of thinking, planning, copying and performing, we finally have a brand new installation of Windows. At this point, everyone should experience at least some sort of performance gain from his or her computer as it is in a nice and clean state. This extra boost of performance didn't come without any hard work, however. If you look back, we spent loads of time planning how and what to backup, making the actual backups, those tense moments of actually formatting your hard drive, installing Windows back onto the computer and then eventually to configure Windows to your liking-I never said that this task was going to be easy.

I hope that all this hard work was worth it for you. It's always nice to have something nice, clean and efficient to work with. The extra performance boost you get from doing this reformat should be worth all the work and effort-but the work doesn't stop here. As you fill up your computer again with programs, games and files, you'll find that performance again begins to degrade. It is critical that you keep your computer in top shape all the time. Don't install just about anything you can find out there onto your computer just so they'll give you a "cool" feature. Do some research before you install programs, see how much resources that program will take up and decide whether or not it's worth it to loose that bit of performance for that program. If you don't like something you stick into your computer, remove it immediately, don't wait until later when you'll probably eventually forget and let the program stay in your computer like some weight holding down the level of performance. Do daily or weekly cleanups of your system. Delete any temporary files you don't need anymore, do scandisk checks and defrag your hard drive. These little things can really help to keep your system running as efficient as it can for a much more longer time.

Unfortunately, no matter how often you clean up your computer, things do tend to pile up, and then your only way out will be to perform the reformatting again. This time, you shouldn't be afraid of anything! The second time will usually take you much less time to perform, and you can always turn back to OnePC.NET if you get stuck! I find that I perform a reformat of my hard drive almost every few months, sometimes even every few weeks. Once you've done this process a few times yourself, you might even want to consider doing it as often as I do just to always have that efficient computer we all love to work with.

I hope that this guide has been helpful for you to reinstall Windows for the first time. As always, if you have any problems or suggestions, feel free to tell everyone about it to your heart's content in our forum or you could always contact me directly--either way, I'm sure you'll be able to find an answer.