I just bought my first laptop. The Toshiba Terca A3 1.6.

While I am happy with the laptop so far, it suffers from a massive case of software bloat. There is so much rubbish running on there, I'm sure the thing is slugish.

Furthermore, they have left the harddrive as one big partition, where I would prefer 2. One for the OS, and one for all my saved stuff.

The solution seems simple... format and reinstall WinXP.

However, there is some software on there that I figure I might need. Like the little applet that tells me how much battery power is left etc..

If I format, partition and reinstall my own copy of WindowsXP, I will of course loose all those laptop specific apps. Yes?

Where do I then get them from? Are they standard to WinXP? I have been to the Toshiba site and I can't see the apps there.

Also, i got a Toshiba branded CD of Windows XP with the laptop. I could reinstall that, but I figure that it might set the thing up will that bloat of software I mentioned above.

What should I do here?


<font color=purple><b>Brad</b></font color=purple>

The included cd will restore your machine to exactly as it appeared out of the box, bloat and all.
Utilities for battery monitoring, etc, are avaliable on the toshiba website for download.
You will need to use a regular xp cd to do a format/reinstall w/ diff partitions.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>