Reformat My Computer...

[Dollunit]

First off, I'm new here, a friend turned me on to this place and says he always gets the help he needs, so I'm hoping you can help me as well.

Alright, heres the scoop. My computer came with Vista on it and I've had that for like 2 years now. Recently, I got a virus on my computer which just killed it, and was advised to reformat my computer. No big deal, I've been meaning to do this for a while now anyway due to all the junk I've downloaded over the years. I also wanted to get Windows 7 on it. So I went to BB and got W7, and the guy told me to just put in the disc, select custom, and let it do its thing and it would be like a brand new computer running W7...like I wanted. So I did this, and everything from before the upgrade is in a folder Windows.old and already 163gb of my hard drive are being used. I've also noticed that my computer will no longer run transparencies and with a little research found it might be due to my hard drive state.

Heres what I want to know. How do I completely wipe/reformat this computer so that its basically like taking it out of the box again. Its an HP, so I don't have any discs from them containing Vista, if that would even work now that I have W7 on it. If Vista is on it again when I'm done, no big deal, I'll do the upgrade again, I've got time.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Terry60]

The .old folder is just there to enable you to undo the W7 upgrade and go back to Vista.
If you don't want to go back you can delete it.
Best leave it till you must have the space back, to maximize your options.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...7074#RecoverOS
describes how to factory reset your HP (assuming the HP hidden partition is still intact)