It means removing everything on your hard drive and reinstalling WINDOWS and then your prograsms again.

A clean install is reinstalling windows with default settings. After a clean install, you will lose all data and user settings.

A clean install is when you format your hard drive (ideally removing partitions as well) and reinstall windows onto a clean hard drive. It will eliminate all viruses.

Guess what? A clean install does not not only refer to Windows. A clean install refers to formatting your hard drive, and then installing any operating system. And it even doesn't have to be a re-install. It can be installing an operating system never previously run by that computer.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp It's a hassle for a variety of reasons, but sometimes clean installing Windows is the best bet. This is doubly true of XP, especially if you were previously running a Windows 9x-based OS. The upgrade procedure works, and works well, but it still leaves your hard drive littered with the remains of the past, wasting valuable disk space and making it difficult to tell which files are OK to delete and which should be left alone. A clean installation of XP will also give you the best results, performance-wise. The downside, of course, is that you're starting fresh and will have to reinstall all of your applications, backup and restore all of your data, and re-do all of your personal settings. There are tools that will help you overcome these issues (see the pre-installation checklist below), but in some ways it's still a good idea to make that clean break with XP, especially for the 9x crowd. This is because XP is so different that you might want to spend time using it in its default set up. I suspect that many people won't want to change a thing if they just give it a chance