Clean Up PC After Reinstall

[bflo_chick]

My husband did something to my laptop and essentially I have never seen so many system errors and such on boot up in my life. So I popped in XP Prof and did a complete reinstall, not an upgrade. The laptop is great now but 10gb of the hard drive is still used up. I couldn't imagine the OS would take up that much space. After I did the reinstall I noticed all of the folders for the programs that were on the PC were still there, so I deleted them, but still have that 10gb used up. Is this normal? And if not, are there any utilities out there that I could install to scan and remove any unused files/space that you would recommend?
Thanks.

[faulkner132]

Are you sure you did a reinstall and not a repair in the XP installation program?
I would recommend doing *another* reinstall, but make sure you delete the existing Windows partition in the XP setup program before installing the fresh copy.

[bflo_chick]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, i am positive it was a complete reinstall and it even prompted me if I was sure I wanted to overwrite the existing Windows installation on to the C drive.

[rjfvillarosa]

From what you are saying it looks like you do have two instances of XP installed, can you tell us what make and model of laptop it is and do you have recovery disks? or a full XP installation disk?

[glc]

As Faulkner said - to get a total wipe and clean reinstall, the partitions have to be deleted and recreated in Setup. Everything in your old profile is still there.

[bflo_chick]

I have a dell inspiron 1100. I have the setup disks from dell which contain XP Home. I did not want XP Home because I had a full instance of Prof so I used that for the installation. When it initially started it asked me where I wanted to install, and I said the partition for the C drive. Then it came up and warned me that it would over write the existing installation and wipe the profiles and I allowed it to. My old profiles were wiped out, but yes, I agree, there must be something still out there. I put alot of hours in already, but I'd really prefer a totally clean installation. What would be the best steps from here? And I already activated XP Pro so would that cause an issue on reinstalling it if need be?
Thanks for all your help!

[glc]

As said, delete the partitions and install on a blank drive. This will be an option in Setup. You will probably have to call to reactivate because it's been activated within the past 120 days.

[bflo_chick]

OK, thank you. I will do that.