Hello,
My Sister has a corrupt version of Windows XP professional on a DELL Computer. The tech came over her house and re-installed the power unit,CPU,two fans,heat sink,and told her she has to call DELL and be on the phone from two to four hours while they walk her through re-installing the XP Operating system! She really doesn't know her way around the MoBo,and is not strong enough to tilt the Tower over to remove a few things prior to Wiping the hard drive for a Clean install like I've read below...is this true?

"Remove everything that is installed or connected to your computer so the only things remaining in the case are
(Motherboard, processor, and cooling fan ,Graphics card,One stick of RAM, One hard drive,
One CD ROM ") "


SOoooooo...

What would be (if any) the easiest best scenario for her,or anyone to re-install the OS herself? She also has Cox cable. Would she still have to unplug her networking PCI card? I am trying to help her over the phone.
I was going to tell her (tell me if I am wrong) to :
1) Get into Bios and make sure the Boot Sequence is the CD ROM.
2) Then reboot with the Windows XP CD in the drive.
3) Select to Delete Partition (C) Install Windows on that Partition. (NTFS)

And most importantly.....
4) I would also assume that once someone activates the original WinXP license,he/she has to call back Microsoft to get an updated registration key otherwise, Windows will not re-install? All she is doing is re-installing an operating system on the same computer which basically has had corrupted files problems. I think she should NOT have to buy another WINXP O.S.
Thank you for all or any info you can give me.... :-)

Also,I've heard that sometimes people shut off the microsoft Auto Updates because that screws up too.

I don't really remove anything when re-installing windows. You will get a few messages coming up saying "driver not found, please locate" and things like that. But if you ahve all of the disks then it is fairly easy to put in and install.

1) Get into Bios and make sure the Boot Sequence is the CD ROM.
2) Then reboot with the Windows XP CD in the drive.
3) Select to Delete Partition (C)
4) Create Parttion (C)
5) Format NTFS (C)
6) Install Windows on that Partition


The only time you would have to call Microsoft is if lots of internal hardware has changed. If nothing has changed then the online net activation will work.

Automatic Updates generally only fails if your copy is illegal as far as I have found out. If you are having trouble though then try Autopatcher. This is a download that contains all of the updates to Windows XP.