[Archived] Reformatting Vista / Deleting Programs Quickly And Efficiently

[Eddie]

So I'd like to remove a lot of programs from my laptop, but as I don't have the vista cd I'm not sure how best to do it. Any ideas?

[LeChuck]

Can you be more specific? I'll try and give you a better answer if I can.

I think this should do what you want though. You get a fully functioning 30 day trial, so that should give you more than enough time to do what you want.

Under the 'computer clean up' sub menu on the left, use 'uninstall manager' to remove everything you want to get rid of. Then use the 'registry cleaner' and 'disk cleaner' to tidy up everything (well, most things) that will have been left over from those programs. You might want to manually check the folders they were installed in as well (in c:\program files or whatever the Vista equivalent is) and delete any that are still around. Then go to the 'optimization' sub menu and do a 'registry defrag' and 'disk defrag'.

Assuming I've understood you correctly, that should do what you want. If you want to format and reinstall then I'm sure your laptop must have a recovery partition with the Vista set-up files on, that's usually how they work anyway. A full format would be better solution providing you remember to back-up everything important.

[Eddie]

Thanks for that, that should do the trick.