Going to wipe my computer -- advice?

[Greg J]

Okay, I have a standard Dell I bought a couple of years ago. It's not that outdated -- 256 ram, 1.8 Pent 4, 30 gigs -- nothing special but adequate. The damn thing has been running so SLOW lately, and has not been wanting to run some programs. Specifically Yahoo Messenger (which my wife loves) and a picture viewer for our digital camera won't start at all. I have run spayware programs (Spybot and MS spyware beta) and a decent anti-virus program (Symantec). I just defraged and nothing. The fact that these programs are refusing to start makes warning bells go off in my head (that this is something virus related).

Anyhow, I think I just want to wipe eveything and start from scratch. One problem: I can't find the f-ing restart disk! (I can't beleive I was dumb enough to loose it, but anyhow.) So what are my options? I want to nuke the damn thing and start over reinstalling stuff. This computer is fine for what I and my wife use it for (email, word processing, chatting, poker) when it works.

Thoughts and advice are appreciated.