Hi there.
Wiping everything is VERY easy, when you go through the process of starting to install windows, and you are at the select destimation disk drive for installation, you read and select the "c:" particion and you enter d to delete it, win will ask you to confirm and you do so (with all the partisions), and then you select the unpartitionned space (the whole disk) and you do a FULL format, it takes longe but it erases everything and it rewrites the whole disk in effect doing a good job of checking it, and you follow the rest of the win installation.
DRIVERS...
Drivers aren't a bitch to find as you seem to think, unless of course the manufacturer of your PC's main board is out of business.
Brand Name PC's: Ex: DELL Optiplex GX280.
You go on to the internet to
www.dell.com and look on the page for "support or driver download".
Then you enter the model name & Number; Optiplex GX280
Then the OS Win XP
and you D/L the Audio, Video (not Monitor), Chipset, Lan, if you have a modem and other interfaces you will need to D/L them too.
Then you install them one at a time and reatart as they require.
JohnDowe.