Help me fix my roommate's computer

[RangerWickett]

He bought a surplus computer from my university. During installation, apparently the computer already had Windows 95, but he did not remove it, and just installed Windows XP Professional edition on top of it.

The computer's not partitioned or anything. When you turn it on, it asks whether you want to start 'Windows' or 'Windows XP.'

I figured it wasn't a big deal, but when I was trying to get him some free protection (AVG, SpyBot, NoScript, etc.), AVG said it was not compatible with his OS. I'm guessing it sees the computer as Win 95.

Does anyone know how I can fix this easily, to just uninstall windows 95, but keep XP, or do we have to format and start from scratch?

 

[Ebonyr]

He bought a surplus computer from my university. During installation, apparently the computer already had Windows 95, but he did not remove it, and just installed Windows XP Professional edition on top of it.

The computer's not partitioned or anything. When you turn it on, it asks whether you want to start 'Windows' or 'Windows XP.'

I figured it wasn't a big deal, but when I was trying to get him some free protection (AVG, SpyBot, NoScript, etc.), AVG said it was not compatible with his OS. I'm guessing it sees the computer as Win 95.

Does anyone know how I can fix this easily, to just uninstall windows 95, but keep XP, or do we have to format and start from scratch?

I would personally start from scratch, clean the hard drive and reinstall windows xp

 

[fba827]

yeah, i hate to say it, but when you're talking OS, it's probably best to start from scratch... but that's just my opinion...

 

[Thanee]

Windows... what!?

Kill it completely, then install XP from scratch!

No good mixing with such an old OS.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Merkuri]

Another agreement of the "start from scratch" thing.

In college I used to reformat my PC and start over again once every six months or so. I haven't reformatted nearly that often since college, but I also haven't been installing nearly as much junk on it. It's nice to start over with a fresh PC every now and then (as long as all of your files are backed up, of course).

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I've been running two desktop machines with kvp to switch between them. Just recently had to move everything to the Vista machine in order to reformat my XP machine which had finally reached the stage where the accumulated garbage was too much of an irritatant. I wouldn't have bothered with the reformat but I had a few games which simply would not play under Vista and I also wanted to keep it to run voip.

Dust off and nuke the site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.

If I could just figure out why it won't find the mouse when switching over the kvp I'd be happy as a clam, but I now use the XP machine for _almost_ nothing anyway so I just have a spare mouse dedicated to it.

 

[RangerWickett]

I have done as suggested. Thanks for the clarification. I figured I'd have to start over, but I didn't want to feel dumb for doing it if it wasn't necessary.