Windows XP for Home Users, Service Pack 2 Edition

The "Clean" Installation

As you saw in Table A.1, some users have no choice but to do a "clean" installation of Windows XP. Other users might choose to install clean, to avoid any baggage (in terms of settings, and so on) associated with their previous OS.

A clean installation wipes everything off your hard disk and installs XP to what is now a completely clean disk. This is a rather drastic installation, as it also deletes any programs and personal files that are on the disk. It also means that you'll have to reinstall all your programs after you install Windows.

When is a clean installation a good idea? If your old system wasn't running right or was messed up in one way or another, a clean install makes sure that your old problems won't follow you to a new OS. A clean installation is also called for if you were running Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT 3.51. These versions of Windows can't be easily upgraded, so you have to start from scratch if you want to run Windows XP.

There's one other reason you might want to consider a clean installation. When you do an upgrade, you retain many of the files from the old operation. When you do a clean install, you don't have these old files sticking around to clutter up your hard disk. Compare the average 2.9GB size of Windows XP installed via upgrade to the 1.7GB size after a clean installation. That's a lot of wasted disk space you can recover by doing a clean install.

After you decide to perform a clean installation, the process is very similar to that of an upgrade install. Just follow the onscreen instructions and be sure you have a few thick magazines to read while the installation program does its thing. (Although that's another advantage of a clean installation it should take about half the time as an upgrade install.)