Laptop Rebuild

So am going to rebuild my laptop from scratch today, after ideas you cats gave me in that Win7 thread.
Just dumping the important data (pics, movies, music, documents) off to my external HD and restarting.

I'm doing it because laptop is filling up, slowing down, hasn't ever been rebuilt (so all that crap that comes with it still there) etc.
Couple of questions (me being Mr Relative Tech Noob)
- Should I bother with Win7 or just reinstall off the Windows Vista reinstall disc I have here from Dell?
- In either case, do you just restart the computer with the boot disc in and it will wipe and restart from there? Or do you need to format the whole thing first, THEN insert the boot disc?

Chur!

P.S. A certain Mr_b, you suggested you may be able to get Office to me. Looks like I might need it afterall (only Word, Excel, PP, maybe Access really necessary). Would be great if easy but clearly no obligation on you for some weirdo on the intertubes :>

Quick format is a good clean start, you *may* want to give yourself a 40Gig system partition so in future if you want to reinstall the computer you dont have to hose the whole disk.

I have c:40 and e:210.

Thanks Bob - issue I have here is laptop HDD is pretty tiny, so even a 40Gb partition (I presume you use that for OS, the other for data?) takes a good chunk!

I'll probably just setup a decent backup routine that takes it all over to the 500Gb HDD regularly.


So the main question (just to prove the noobness!), is how do I do the quick format?!

It doesnt matter really. The key is not to install on to the old partition (in which case youll end up with two operating systems in the same partition).

I cant remember the prompts but as long as it is formatting the drive you are fine.

Look online if you want to make doubly sure but its nearly impossible to fuck up.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/installation-instructions.aspx

Righto, thanks man.

If you never hear from me on the interwebs again...

might pay to download a vista driver for your laptops network card just in case...

though i havent heard of any issues.

Well I'm baaaaacccckkkk...

One thing though, was presented with 4 partitions when I went to install:
- OEM (kept it)
- Dell MediaDirect (deleted)
- C drive (kept and expanded to include above)
- D drive (10Gb, tried to delete but ?)

When I look in Windows Drive Manager now I have no D drive, but 10Gb "unallocated" against the main drive. How do I get this used (ideally just added to C drive for now)? Can't see a merge/expand etc option...

Thanks again guys...

You'll need 3rd party software to resize your partition without losing any of the data on it and use that extra 10.

You probably deleted your old D: drive fine but you probably didn't delete the old C: drive and create a new one with the extra 10GB after.

I don't know of any 'free stuff' but I'm sure you could track some down. Partition Magic is designed for that sorta thing but its not free.

The alternative would be to reinstall and make the partition right from the start.

Hmmmmm, thanks. Will look around.
It seems to be a problem that my unallocated space is "on the left" of my main C partition in Windows Disk Management. Interwebs suggests I should be able to extend but I don't think it goes that way.

Yeah if you deleted your old C: and created a new one it would have positioned itself to the 'left most' position.

Partition Magic could extend it any which way you want.

They are part of some big software company these days. Forget which one.

Have they made a new version? Seems they havent updated it since XP.

Ya can arrange G