Regardless, after my last writeup of the Windows ME release, I received lots of e-mails on how to "bury the cabs" on the HDD to make life a bit sweeter after the install is done. I took it for granted that most of you all would know what I was talking about, it was a trick taught to me by a very knowledgeable System Administrator and has saved me many hours of chasing my tail on more than one occasion. Some things we take for granted, and this is one of them for me. So bare with me as I divulge the vast amounts of knowledge on installing a clean Windows (yep, lots of BS in here too, he he!).

First off is starting out with a clean hard disk. Now is the time to back up all those favorites, your good porn pic's you just don't want to lose, and anything else of importance because the steps described in this paragraph or two will render the HDD completely void of your current info. While some will argue the info might still be retrievable, for the purposes of this article let's just say you ain't getting it back.

On to step one in our little endeavor. Before nuking the drive of all that data, do a search for "xcopy*.*" inside Windows and copy the 3 files it finds to the boot floppy you should already have in hand. Yes, all three files will fit, as they amount to about 52K in size altogether. Since xcopy is not the subject of this review, all I will tell you is it let's you do a more complete and painless copy of all the cab files in their designated directory than regular old copy would allow.

With these files on your boot disk, and a CDROM containing the version of Windows you would like to install, we are ready to proceed with cleaning the drive.

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