jjbtnc

hello all - finally found a great forum! Just wanted a quick bit of advice - in the past when i have had a pc which did not come with an OS disk i have made my own so that i can do a clean install of the OS. To do this under xp home and pro i used to work with a copy of the i386 folder that you invariably find on the pc's hard drive. I then slipstream sp2 and sometimes other patches and then follow a few guys to burn the resulting folder structure on to a cd. This has then created the xp cd media which used in conjunction with the legitimate key that came with the pc can be used to do a fresh install. I've also done this for friends so that they have an OS cd if ever they need one. I now have this situation with my niece's acer laptop. unfortunately Acer seem to have a knack for preloading loads of uneeded utilities and programs and junk so i would again like to make an OS cd from the files on the laptop. this laptop runs the latest windows MCE (it's about 2 months old) and i'm not sure of the process. I realise the info is on this site somewhere but the situation is that she is leaving tomorrow to go to Uni so i'm not sure if i am going to have much time to mess around with things. SO...........for now i wanted to make sure i have a copy of every file and folder that i will need to copy from the laptop in order to re-create the xp MCE OS disk/s.....i can then research at my leisure!!! For a start i'm presuming this can be done but i should check first! so which files/folders do i have to make sure i have to work with in order to do this - i know it has an i386 folder but is this all that is needed? what about the extra bits that make it a MCE os and not just a plain old XP OS? i also want to make sure that i have any oem specific files that may be needed - not sure what the situation is with these files and what they do and whether they are 100% needed - if it's to do with not having to activate then i'm happy to activate via the net/phone. Hope somebody can help with this info