I want to wipe out everything on my hardrive. I know I have to back up all my files I want. But I don't know how to go about doing it.

Can anyone give me a hand?

I have Vista if that makes a difference

ok once youve backed up what you need, grab your windows key, insert it into the cd drive, restart, go into the bios, change your boot priority under advanced bios features, so that the cd drive is the first priority. save and exit, it will ask you to press any key to boot from the cd. do so. now just follow the prompts. when wiping your hard drive, do a format with ntfs, but dont do the quick one. then its all pretty simple from then on. do what it tells you to do, and make sure you have your windows cd key before starting any of this.