New.. And question about slow emachines..

Welp, first of all I'm new.. hi. I've been reading the boards for about 3 months now. I am building my first computer this August, and this is a pretty darn good place to get info about it!

Anyways..

The question I have is about a store bought emachines.. Now I am certainley not the one who bought it. My parents bought it, without asking or telling me, go figure.. It is a 2ghz Celeron and the dang thing drives me crazy. It runs a crapload slower than my 733 P3! Now I hear that it is because of all the crap programs and spyware that emachines loads onto the comp for the consumer to put up with.

I was just wondering what I can do to get it to a point where its a clean reformat without having it be a emachines restore, with the extreme slowness..

Format and install ur OS again.. What OS CD do you have??.

All you have to do is format your hard drive and then reinstall the OS. You might want to check out adaware to check for spyware: http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10...ml?tag=lst-0-3

Well thats the thing, I have the restore CD that came with the emachines.

I am afraid that if I use that, it will make no difference as all of that slowing down software will just be reinstalled onto the computer.

Is my only option to buy Windows XP and use that to reformat?

Yeah most companies will include a recovery cd, but it stills has all the useless stuff on it. Alienware was nice and gave me just a copy of the OS. Then they put all the programs and drivers on another cd. Still all those programs weren't junk they were useful.

Can the reg number for an install like this be used with an OEM disk for a clean install? I tried this a long time ago with Win95, and it would not work, I kept getting invalid reg number. If you get a disk that is the exact version as the pre-installed version, will it work? You own the copy of Windows that is pre-installed, so wouldn't it be legal to get a copy of an OEM disk and install in this manner?

I second the idea of obtaining a true CD of Windows XP and using that to install. That's one often unspoken advantage of building a system - unless you have it already, you can get a real CD of Windows that has no other "Stuff" with it.

You always have the option to buy a new copy of XP, but that's pricey - $150 to $200. You could always buy some hardware to get an OEM copy, but then that's still $90-$100 plusthe cost of the hardware.

Due to legality and Sharky's AUP, I wouldn't normally suggest what I'm about to. Do you have a friend that has a Windows XP CD you could borrow (not copy)? You could use that CD with your CD Key to install. After all, you own the XP license, which matters far more than the CD.

Good luck with your situation...

Another good spyware eliminator is SpyBot. But the eMachines system probably runs slower than your's because the Celeron has very small L1 and L2 cache and the system probably has less memory. SpyBot: http://security.kolla.de/index.php?l...&page=download