looking to clean pc

[Agi]

hey gang,

so i'm as pretty much a computer noob as they come, so this is probably a really simple (stupid) question, but:

my brother has left for college, leaving me his 1-2yr old pc. it still works, i'm using it right now, but it has tons of virus', spam, etc. on here that makes it run realllllllly slow and sometimes not at all. my bro has given me permission to completely erase everything on here, converting it back to how it was when he first bought it.
now for my question: how do i do this?

or, would there be a better way to go about "cleaning" the computer, getting rid of all the nasty stuff on here but without completely rebooting everything?

thanks in advance for your responses

[killerx]

reformatting best and safest

[BadKarma]

Solution; Lay off the porn and get AVG, Firefox Noscript and Adblock

[Reality]

when you reboot the PC, is there anything on the screen during the startup that says something about system restore or restore? that's where you wanna head with this, most pre-built PC's come with a factory restore partition that lets you restore the machine to factory, erasing everything that has been installed/downloaded after the fact

[Shuemue]

Give us more info... make, model, etc

If it's not a pre-built with a restore partition, you'll need a windows XP cd

[Elesirdur]

Give us more info... make, model, etc

If it's not a pre-built with a restore partition, you'll need a windows XP cd

Or more specifically, since these are easier to answer:

• What OS are you running? (XP, Vista...)
• How many hard drives or partitions do you have?
• Was the system custom made, or did you buy it from a store/manufacturer? If it was not custom made, who what brand is it?
• Do you have any of the discs that the system came with when it was first purchased? i.e. recovery discs, OS disc