Need to reformat computer and need info

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katatonic:
My daughter's laptop seems to have a virus or spyware or something, and because she stupidly did not have an anti-virus program on it we can't remove it.  We are unable to load the software on it now.  It looks like we need to reformat.  When I took it to the local computer store, they're going out of business and told me to just do it myself.  If I knew how to do that I wouldn't be trying to pay them to do it!  Can anyone point me to a tutorial (preferably one that assumes I have no knowledge of computers)?

Nec:
All you need is the Windows cd that should have come with the computer. You put that in the cd drive, reboot, then it will walk you through it. HERE is a full-blown tutorial. Good luck :)

katatonic:
Thanks for the link.  The partitioning part is confusing me, however.  What shows up on the screen is:
-:  Partition1 [FAT]   16MB  (8MB free)
C: Partition2 [NTFS]  38131MB  (28880MB free)
    Unpartitioned space  8MB
Do I just delete Partition2 or both of them?  How badly can I mess things up if I delete the wrong stuff?  I'd hate to have to spend hours on this and then have to find someone to pay to do it anyway, but with three kids downloading spyware daily this would be a valuable skill for me to have.

Diala:
Hm, it seems the first partition doesn't have a drive letter, but the second one has the standard C: one. I think it is okay to leave it, since I DO believe that only partitions with letters show up in Windows. Then again, the only formatting I've done is on Virtual PC.

Also, did the computer restart with the Windows XP Installation wizard? If it is stuck like that, try rebooting it yourself. It SHOULD show up, according to this walkthrough.

miros:
One great idea before you let the 3 kids loose again... Get some AV.  Any AV.  Also something like SpyBot.

Did you back up your Sims data directory first?

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