rebooting windows xp?

[Burnie Burnerson]

Tomorrow I shall be buying a maxtor 250gig External HD. Like I was explaining before my PC was not set up with NTFS file compression activated. I am thinking of maybe 2 choices wondering about your opinions on the matter. Situation 1: I clean up my system of all files that aren't windows related, back up whatever I need to CD/DVD, and change my folders and files left to NTFS. Situation 2: I wipe my hd clean and reboot windows. The thing that I'm wondering is if I do step 2 I don't have a backup cd of windows it's the type that was already installed on my system. Is it really difficult to restart windows? I've never done it. Can anyone recommend that I take this on are there literature or web reference for a guy who wants to do it himself. Thanks to all my helpful homies at file forums!