Firing Squad has posted part 1 of their Windows XP guide

Either flavor of Windows XP will benefit greatly from a clean, fresh install to an empty hard drive. Upgrades, particularly from Windows 9x, can be spotty at best. I highly recommend backing up your data and formatting the C: drive with the FAT 32 file system. Hopefully you have used FDISK or some other program to properly create a full FAT 32 partition. This article assumes you did and that it is working just fine with no bad sectors, lost clusters, etc. Don't forget you can do a Quick Format to save time if you are just doing a simple erase operation of what is already on the FAT 32 partition. If you want the fastest, most trouble-free install, I would recommend that you install XP directly from the bootable CD. Most modern systems support bootable CD's, though some will need to have the BIOS set to allow for it. You may find after installation that when you make changes the system asks you for the CD so it can copy files from it, but if you don't mind the prompts, it is the best way to go.

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