Using old laptop for Audacity Home Recording

I want to use my recently ressurected toshiba satellite A-15 135 (Celeron, 500 Ram, 30 gig HD, XP) to practice and record guitar with audacity, download backing tracks, drum beats, etc.
History: A year ago this laptop died and since it was 3+yrs old, the battery was almost dead, the fan has a constant growl, the cost to repair was getting to 50% of replacement so I got another Toshiba Laptop with Vista dual core which is now my main machine. I got a mad dog external drive to get the info off my old laptop but in the process somehow was able to repair the old hard drive and recently I plugged it back in the old laptop and it works! I'm sure this is asked frequently, but I wonder if I should keep trying to delete things off the old hard drive, or wipe the slate clean and start over. I don't need to keep anything, but I've never cleaned a HD and reinstalled the OS and I don't know 1, what is easier and 2. what will allow the best performance. (When I have used this in the past if I get too many tracks going on Audacity the system sometimes stalls, but this when this was my main laptop.) I will still need to have wireless internet for downloading drum tracks, advice and backing tracks, but nothing else. I have the recovery disk, but I don't know about reinstalling drivers for the internal soundcard, pointing devices, etc.

So far I've been able to use add/remove programs and free up about 50% of the hard disk. when I tried a free ward duplicate file finder, it found over 40,000 dupilcate files (I had stared using the hard disk as an external back up, but it really isn't big enough and will be better used back in the old laptop which is solely dedicated to the music room.

thank you for any advice and pointing me to any existing threads on directions on either option.

 

I decided to go with the reformat. Dang!
The reformat has failed...several times. It seems 2 files: SCESRV.DLL and SAMSRV.DLL can't be found. so, hours and hours later, I'm searching the internet for fixes! Anyway, i'm doggedly keeping at the reformat.

I can't boot to the recovery console. The instructions are to hold 'C' while turning power on. The only options are to continue or abort. If I abort it goes to the A:\ Prompt or if I continue it goes into re-reformatting. After :45 mins it will try to boot to XP and after another :15 mins the XP screen goes to a blue Wait while XP starts then the " The application failed to start because SCESRV.dll was not found. Re-install the application may fix the problem". I click ok and the next one SAMSRV.DLL cant be found. I click OK and then the screen goes dark and nothing happens. I can boot to safe mode from the C drive, but again the same thing happens. I guess I need to find a way to boot from the recovery disk and do this?
"Do you have your windows XP CD? If you do, I want you to put it in and turn on your computer. When you are given the message press any key to boot from cd..., press a key and Windows Setup will start. At the first screen where you have to enter input, hit R to enter the Recovery Console. Then you will have to hit 1 to log into your windows installation and then just hit Enter for the Administrator password because it is normally blank unless you changed it. Once you are at the command prompt C:\WINDOWS I want you to type chkdsk /p /r. This will run a VERY THOROUGH check of both your hard drive and also your windows installation files and replace any that are missing/corrupt. Once it's done, type Exit and take out your Windows XP cd. Your computer will reboot itself.

Fenor "