I have a laptop with super small IDE hard drive, and it hasn't been formatted for a long while. I want to format the drive clean, get rid of the recovery partition that only wastes space, and have a clean install without any bloatware except drivers.
But my google-fu doesn't seem to work today, all links about how to do that don't seem to fill the basic questions I have.
I have a XP PRO sticker on the laptop with genuine key, the laptop was pre-activated during previous 2 installs, the first one from factory, on the second because I did restore from recovery partition, so it just did the ghosting or whatever the Lenovo recovery software did aside from installing bloat. But now I want to do a clean, XP Pro w SP3 integrated, install, so that the system is clean from bloat right from the start.
And now I don't know:
1) What kind of Windows Pro SP3 CD do I have to get and how? Is it OEM, Retail or something else?
2) How can you get the .iso file of this disc? As far as I understand there is an .iso on the Microsofts TechNet, but I am not registered there. Do I have to call them?
3) What will happen with the activation, will it just activate when I click ok, or does it skip activation because it's an OEM Laptop?
4) What about nLite? Is it worth customizing the install? I took a quick peek at the software, and somehow it seemed that it might cause a lot of troubles if I customize something wrong.
5) Any other tips?