Reformat new laptop?

Hi,
I read quite a few posts here from people who wiped the hard drive before using their machine.
I would like to know what the advantage is of doing this.
I have been using mine (AS5051 AWXMi)for a little over three weeks now and have a DVD of the image as instructed when first switching on, and backups of all my recent work.
Would it still pay me to reformat?

Thanks in advance

 

I'm not too sure with what Acer does, but some manufacturers include bloatware on the recovery DVD. The whole of point of formatting and installing Windows again, is to remove these pointless programs and get a sligjtly faster system, and to regain some extra hard drive space.

 

Like Zero, I don't know if the recovery dvd includes all the same things but probably it does...

So it would be useless to reinstall until it is with a "clean" xp cd

 

You would not gain anything by doing this. Recover only restores your system to factory spec anyway. So you end up with the same stuff already installed. But typically, Acer doesn't really include that much stuff on their computers, much less than companies like HP, etc. - which is a good thing.

If you want, you can just uninstall the few programs you might not want to use, like maybe Norton antivirus (if you plan on using another). Most programs on Windows XP SP2 uninstall fairly cleanly anyway. If you do want to uninstall some things, do that first, defragment your hard drive and then just start doing whatever you want to do with your laptop. If you are really anal about not having anything left over in your registry from uninstallations, you can use a free registry cleaner like Ccleaner. It works very well. But it's not absolutely necessary. These few leftover entries in the registry aren't going to affect anything.

Just make sure that if you do uninstall something, you do it via the control panel's add and remove utility.