Every so often the time will come where you need to reformat your pc. This could be for many reasons, you might have a stubborn virus you can’t get rid of, you might have a new hard drive, or you might just want a fresh start and want to get rid of all that old software and those old files you no longer use!

Regardless of the reasons a reformat is pretty straight forward. Ideally you are going to want the original Windows installation CD, whether it be 2000, XP, Vista or 7. You are going to need this to reinstall windows anyway so this is kind of essential. Make sure that you have backed up all your files to an external drive because once you have formatted you won’t be getting them back!

Firstly you need to pop the windows CD into your PC. Now if you’re in Windows then restart the machine, if not then power it up. The first thing that needs doing is the boot order needs to be changed so that your machine looks in the CD drive first for a bootable medium. This might already be the case but in case it isn’t I am going to talk you through it. When you first turn your machine on and before Windows loads you will get an initial startup screen that should hopefully say in the corner “Press F2 to enter setup”, it might not say F2, it might say DEL, F8, F10 or another key, but whatever it says press that key! Check below for an example:

For this particular machine we have to press DEL to enter setup. Once you’ve done so you should be presented with a bios menu that looks similar to the one below:

Depending on your PC manufacture this screen could vary, however you are wanting to change the standard CMOS features so look for this heading, or it might be entitled ‘Boot Order’ or something similar. Fell free to browse through the menu’s and look for the first, second and third bootable devices as these are what you need to change. Check out the below for what it might look like:

The important thing here is that the first bootable device is set to CD, if it is not currently then change it so it is, once you’ve done this look for the key that allows you to ‘Save changes and exit’.

At this point you’re ready to boot from the Windows CD so pop it in the drive and restart the machine. Hopefully you should be prompted by “Press any key to boot from the CD drive”, if so then press any key and allow the CD to load and boot. Depending on your Windows version you should eventually be prompted by a setup screen, if you’re on Windows 7 then you will have a language selector. If you’re on Windows XP you will be prompted to install windows or go into the recovery console, make sure you choose to install Windows.

If you’re on Windows 7 you should eventually be prompted by a Disk selection screen, this is where you do the formatting! It should like this one:

This might look slightly different depending on how many drives you have, normally it will be the first drive that will house your operating system, so select this and choose format (WARNING – MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP ANY FILES YOU NEED AS THEY WILL BE ERASED ONCE THE FORMATTING IS DONE!). Once you have formatted you can select the default options to install Windows and you can pretty much leave it alone to install without any major user intervention.

If you’re on Windows XP you will have a slightly different menu. You will be prompted where you want to install to, again make sure you choose the first drive (there might only be one anyway). You will have to use the keyboard to navigate through the menus and press the appropriate keys. You might get warned that an installation of Windows already exists, that is fine just accept the prompt and say yes. Eventually you will be asked what you want to do with the drive, as per below:

Make sure you choose ‘Format the partition using the NTFS file system. Don’t select the FAT file system, it is used and doesn’t support files bigger than 2GB. Once you have chosen to format the Windows installer will do its business and may require a few things off you later (set date/time, network settings etc). Once this is done you should have a clean installation of Windows, ready to use!

The latest installment of Windows has been quite a good success, especially when compared to Vista! If you’re planning on buying Windows 7 then you are going to need to decide between 32bit and 64bit. Now, depending on your processor you may only be capable of running 32bit, you are going to need to check if your processor is 64bit capable.

You can check this in either device manager or your computer properties, if you’re on a 32bit processor then you should have (x86) next to your processor listing, if you’re on 64bit then you should have (x64) next to it.

Now that you’ve determined what processor you have you can decide upon whether you should go for 32bit or 64bit Windows 7. There are a few things to consider first before doing this.

Firstly, how much memory do you have? If you have 4GB or under and don’t plan on ever going above 4GB (most people won’t be doing this for a while) then 64bit Windows is going to be quite pointless. Essentially Windows 7 64bit will allow you to use more than 4GB of ram. Technically speaking 4GB is the limit for a 32bit processor and operating system. 64bit allows for much more memory usage.

Whether you need more than 4GB of ram is dependent upon what you use your computer for, if you’re running lots of different memory intensive applications at once then you might benefit from more than 4GB and in which case the 64bit Windows 7 is for you.

If however you are a casual user and don’t plan on running lots of different programs at once then chances are you won’t need to go for the 64bit edition. Having the 64bit Windows 7 isn’t something you should consider unless you really need it. The reason I say this is because there are still issues with 64bit drivers for some hardware. Simply put if you have some uncommon third party hardware there might not be any 64bit Windows 7 drivers available, and if there aren’t – you won’t be able to use it!

This is the most common reason for people to not upgrade to a 64bit operating system because of the lack of driver support for a lot of hardware; this is especially applicable for Windows 7 because it is a relatively new version of windows.

My advice to anyone considering Windows 7 64bit over 32bit is this – Do you have more than 4GB of memory and are you going to benefit from more? Most casual users simply don’t need it right now and you might think it’s great to have 8GB or more, but a lot of the time it simply won’t get used. If you are running many applications at once and you know for sure that your memory usage can get quite high then yes, go for Windows 7 64bit, but also be aware that you might have to spend some time hunting down 64bit versions of drivers for your hardware.

If you do decide to go for 64bit Windows then you can be safe in the knowledge that your operating system is now future proof and having Windows 7 64bit should mean you won’t need to upgrade for quite a long time!

More and more people each day are facing the dilemma on whether to install the 64bit edition of windows, whether it be for xp, vista (although I hope by now that people have realised how bad an OS vista really is!) or Windows 7. And why wouldnt they? More and more computers are coming with 64bit proessors giving people the choice of a 32bit operating system or a 64bit operating system. Lets take a look at the differences between the two.

Address Space – Without going into too much detail on how a processor works you need to know that processors read data as bits, which can also be refered to as binary or a 1 or 0.  With a 32bit processor you can handle numbers from 0 to 2^32 or 4,294,967,295. Thats a big number, right? Well a 64bit processor can handle numbers from 0 to 2^64 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. So to put these into numbers you can relate to a bit more; a 32bit processor can address roughly 4GB of memory, a 64 bit processor on the other hand can address approximately 18.5 exabytes of memory (1000gb = 1 terabyte, 1000 terabytes = 1 exabyte!) Now im sure you will all agree thats a lot of memory! More than anyone is ever going to need for a long time!

To sum this up, if you have more than 4GB of memory on a 32bit operating system then its never really being used and its technically sitting there doing nothing. If however your on a 64bit operating system then you can address more than 4GB of memory. Most operating systems will still have their own memory limit but its usually very high, Vista Ultimate for example has a limit of 128GB.

The benefits – Ok so we’ve established that we can address a LOT more memory with a 64 bit processor and operating system, but what does this actually mean for the average user? Well quite frankly not a lot! The problem is that the majority of software available has been designed for 32bit and therefore cannot really take advantage of the 64bit features and address space, sure there are a few 64 bit software editions (x64) but there usually few and far between. If your running several memory hungry applications at once then you will probably see some benefits, but for the average user this is unlikely.

The problems – For a lot of people upgrading to a 64bit operating system could soon turn into a nightmare when you try to find 64bit drivers for your hardware. Your normal drivers will NOT work, period. So you need to hope that the manufacture has created 64bit versions or you get lucky and find a 3rd party release. Luckily most 32bit software will run fine on a 64bit operating system in compatibility mode. 16bit software on the other hand will NOT work on 64bit, although most people will no longer use any 16bit software.

In summary then 64 bit operating systems are great, on paper. In practice though there is simply not enough support for 64bit right now and for the average user there is no benefit to upgrading from 32bit to 64bit. In a few years time this will probably change but for now, id stick with 32bit!