HeadChange

How to format and reinstall Windows XP

Is your com­puter slow­ing down? Have you tried all the anti-virus and spy­ware scans around? Have you defrag­mented your hard drive? If you’ve answered yes to those ques­tions, it’s prob­a­bly a good idea to start over with your com­puter. By that, I mean for­mat and rein­stall Windows.

Before doing any­thing, you’re going to want to back up an impor­tant files that you have on the com­puter. Remem­ber, for­mat means erase every­thing!

You’re also going to need to make sure you have a Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem disk some­where. Nor­mally, when you buy a com­puter, you will get a few CD’s with it. One is usu­ally a recov­ery tool and the other is usu­ally an oper­at­ing sys­tem disk.

Once you have your files backed up, put the Win­dows CD into your CD or DVD drive and restart the com­puter. When it begins to start up, you need to pay atten­tion to the BIOS screen, it’s the screen that says Dell or IBM, what­ever kind of com­puter you have. Either on top or bot­tom of the screen, it should have some text. Most com­put­ers are dif­fer­ent, so you’ll have to find the key that needs to be pressed for the Boot Menu. Usu­ally it’s F8 of F11.

It’s going to feel like you are being wel­comed in DOS. Once you’re in the boot menu, select boot from CD-ROM. This will bring you into the Win­dows installer pro­gram. It will take a few moments to ini­tial­ize and load. The first thing you’re going to want to do is delete all the exist­ing par­ti­tions (it should be the first step with XP, but it may be dif­fer­ent with other ver­sions. Par­ti­tions are vir­tual dri­ves that sep­a­rate a phys­i­cal drive.

To for­mat the drive. High­light your C: drive and press D, then con­firm. Now there shouldn’t be any par­ti­tions in the list. Press C to cre­ate a new one, then press enter to install Win­dows on your new par­ti­tion. You’ll want to for­mat it as NTSF when prompted. That’s about it, in 30 min­utes or so, you’ll be done and Win­dows will be installed.

In the future, if you want to be able to avoid hav­ing to back every­thing up, cre­ate another par­ti­tion while you’re still in the par­ti­tion man­ager. Make it half or 3/4 the size of the C: drive. When Win­dows is installed, you’ll need to go to My Com­puter, then right click on the new drive (not C:) and for­mat as NTSF.

This way, you can put all you pho­tos, music and what not into this drive so that next time you need to rein­stall Win­dows, you won’t have to back any­thing up!

Starting Your Website

These days, most busi­ness own­ers own an online web­site ran by either their com­pany or another web host­ing and design com­pany. You may be ask­ing what the big deal about online web­sites for com­pa­nies it… The sim­plest way of answer­ing that ques­tion is money. By post­ing their infor­ma­tion on the web, they are expos­ing their com­pany to mil­lions of inter­net users, which in turn could lead to pos­si­ble profit.

There are many impor­tant aspects of cre­at­ing a good web­site that will make you sales and money. I’ll explain these step by step, now. Keep in mind, that it’s always help­ful to put your ideas down on paper when try­ing to design a site.

Find­ing a cat­e­gory for your web­site. If this is your first time build­ing a web­site, you’re going to want to deter­mine a cat­e­gory that your web­site will fit into i.e. (shop­ping tech­nol­ogy, local cities or even a per­sonal web­site about your hobbies.)

Frame­work. This is one of the most cru­cial aspects of build­ing a site because what you choose to do will be the back bone of your web­site. When decid­ing what to go with, you want to make sure that you keep the com­pany or website’s future in mind. You’ll want to ask your self a few questions.

1. Is the com­pany going to grow in the future?
2. Are we going to con­stantly have to update information?
3. I don’t know how to code HTML.

If you’ve answered yes to any of those ques­tions, chances are you’ll need a CMS or Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. A CMS will orga­nize, store and dis­play all your con­tent for you.  When using a CMS, you don’t need any cod­ing expe­ri­ence, most CMS’s use WYSIWYG edi­tors.  Per­son­ally, my favorite CMS is Word­Press (with a few choice plu­g­ins). Word­Press is just so diverse, I’m pretty sure it was made to have so many uses. You’re prob­a­bly say­ing “No way, Word­Press is a blog plat­form.” That’s true, but you can do way more than blog with it. See the arti­cles below for more Word­Press tutorials.

Some of the CMS out there are Joomla, Jaws, Con­crete and more can be found and demoed at Open­SourceCMS. Nor­mally, when you install a CMS, they come with a bunch of pre­made designs. So depend­nig on your knowl­edge level, you can pick a cool theme and even mod­ify it to your lik­ing if possible.

Once you’ve decided what your web­site will be about and what you will use for the foun­da­tion (you can always design it your­self, but I’m assum­ing that you don’t know how since you’re read­ing this) all you need to do is come up with a nice, catchy name for your site. If you can’t come up with a name, try NameThingy.com, this tool will show you dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of all types of words and if you like one, it will even check the domain availability.

Mak­ing it hap­pen. Now that we have a name, genre of web­site and a back­bone to run it, we need to find a host for it. There are many great host­ing com­pa­nies out there that offer really good plans. You just need to keep in mind that if their servers are unre­li­able, your web­site will be down a lot. Choose a rep­utable com­pany that has good deals. If you’re a begin­ner, a good fea­ture to look for would be cPanel with Fan­tas­tico. Cpanel is a great user inter­face to man­age impor­tant aspects of your web­site. Fan­t­a­sitco is a one click installer tool for pop­u­lar scripts.

If you pur­chased a host­ing account with cPanel and Fan­tas­tico, log into cPanel, go to Fan­tas­tico and click on one of the plat­forms you would like to install.

This arti­cle will be continuously updated.

How to build a web­site (Advanced users)
How to use Word­Press
How to use Joomla