Reinstall XP on Presario V6000

Hello everyone,

Thanks in advance for your help. My dad's Presario V6000 (xp sp2) has been getting increasingly slow, so I went through and did the usual clean up; defrag, delete temp files, etc... I also noticed it had a lot of bloatware, so I uninstalled what I could. There were some programs that weren't even listed in the Uninstall window and I just left them alone. The HD is now only about 25% full, 2gb of memory and it has a Celeron M chip. He just uses it for email and web surfing so I didn't want to buy a new laptop if I could just clean this one up.

After all the cleaning and uninstalling there wasn't much improvement so I though I would just reinstall XP and wipe everything else out. It did not ship with the CD, but it comes with a program that is supposed to wipe everything and start fresh. I found it doesn't actually wipe everything off, it just restores it to the factory condition, bloatware and all. Now it has IE 6, Norton from 2006, other outdated programs and Microsoft Upload Manager won't work. I can't install a newer Norton because it doesn't work on IE 6 and I can't upgrade IE 6 because upload manger doesn't work, etc... I found the installation key with the help of Magic Jelly Bean (think that's what it's called) but haven't been able to find a way to wipe the drive and reinstall the XP with just the key. Is there a way or should I just buy an XP SP2 from ebay, reload and update to SP3?
 
If you bought or downloaded an XP SP2 disk, you might have problems with your key. You'd need to be sure to get an OEM one and there might be other things you need to be aware of that I forgot about..

What I would do is uninstall all the bloat on first boot into Windows, or at least as quickly as possible. Also, maybe get Comodo's suite on it before you ever connect it online (dl to a usb stick from another computer). Get the firewall up, and then go to windowsupdate.com with IE 6. Get all the updates there, it will be a painfully slow process, but that should get you up to speed eventually.

The reason I suggest doing this is because I think if you start with a generic Windows XP disk, you will have a huge headache getting all the drivers for everything. Right now, that restore should have drivers for everything, even if they aren't the most up to date ones.
 
My recommendation is - provided you are right about 'only email and browsing', then installing any of several 'small' linux distributions will produce an ideal, fast machine. For example Ubuntu etc.

There will be a very familiar browsing experience using e.g. firefox, and emailing can easily be via a Linux equivalent to outlook express or (possibly a better choice) via a webmail program (in which you use a browser to send and receive emails). You will have no problems to overcome over Windows drivers, since most Linux's 'just work' from the download.

Of course, that would also be totally free. Check out the forum on this site for any help or advice https://www.techspot.com/community/forums/the-alternative-os.16/
 
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