Reset windows xp installation

Bill Smithers Volunteer Moderator. You may or may not have a manufacturer's recovery partition imaged onto your hard drive to do what you want to do if XP came preinstalled Acer, Dell, HP, etc. How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. Hi Charlie, You don't, at least not without the installation media.

What problem are you having that brings you to want to try a "Factory Reset" of XP? That's called factory resetting which is what you asked about. And you still can get the updates and Service Packs up until when support ended for XP. In reply to Bill Smithers's post on August 7, This process will take several minutes to an hour depending on your hard drive's size. You can select the Quick option here as well, though your hard drive might be improperly formatted if you do so.

Wait for your computer to restart. After the computer finishes formatting, it will restart into the user options setup window. Make sure that you don't press any keys until you arrive at the user options setup window. Part 3. Click Next. It's in the bottom-right corner of the window. You can also click Customize Enter your name, then click Next. Your name goes in the "Name" text field. You can also add a business name in the "Organization" section.

Enter your product key, then click Next. Type the character key that you retrieved earlier into the "Product Key" boxes. Add a password, then click Next. Type your preferred password into the "Administrator password" and "Confirm password" text fields at the bottom of the window. You can also change your computer's name in the text field at the top of the window.

Set a date and time zone, then click Next. Click the "Date" drop-down box, select the current date, and then repeat with the "Time" and "Time Zone" boxes. Check the "Typical Settings" box, then click Next. This will cause Windows XP to install using default settings. Check the "No" box. It's at the top of the window.

If your computer is part of a workgroup, you'll instead check the "Yes" box and enter your workgroup's address in the text box.

This will complete the installation setup process, at which point Windows XP will resume installing. You may have to wait for 30 minutes or so before the installation finishes. It might be on a sticker on the bottom of your laptop if that's what you're using. Yes No. Not Helpful 13 Helpful Unless you keep a backup copy of your i folder, you can't. Ubuntu allows you to dual-boot your computer, which keeps both XP and Ubuntu. Not Helpful 4 Helpful 9. I found an old XP computer.

I want to factory reset it. How can I do that without knowing the admin password? Try to reintall the OS completely. Insert a official CD or dowload and make one. Then just install Windows normally. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 1. What can I do if my computer won't boot up, shows Windows, then shuts down and tries to start up again, then loops? Repeatedly hit F8 on your keyboard during boot up, than select system repair.

If you can't, contact your system manufacturer for a repair CD. Or, if you have to product code, download from the Microsoft website. Not Helpful 9 Helpful 3. Boot into the Windows XP installation, get to the partitions, then format the drive. Just make sure you backed up all files. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 0. However, at the minimum RAM, Vista will be quite laggy. These are supposed to be unique for each device.

If there are a lot of devices, or if they are not installed properly, both of them may end up sharing the same IRQ number. When the user tries to use both devices at the same time, a crash may happen. Ram random-access memory problems might bring on the blue screen of death with a message saying Fatal Exception Error.

Every motherboard is supplied with a range of chipset settings that are decided in the factory. After a few weeks, the information on a hard disk drive starts to become piecemeal or fragmented.

Hard disks will also slow down and crash if be stuffed with too much data. The first sign of a virus infection is instability. Some viruses will erase the boot sector of a hard drive to cause a start failure. This is why it is a good idea to create a Windows restore bootable disk.

A common cause of computer crash is faulty or badly-installed software, as well as the incompatible problem among software.

Backing up and restoring your system is the best choice to secure your system when these issues arise. To make this job easier, it is very important to choose the best Windows system restore software. If there are hard drive corruption or errant startup applications or scripts, Windows system restore may not work properly. In this case, you can use a free Windows automated system recovery software, such as EaseUS free Windows recovery software to restore Windows 10 with ease.