"letting you in and keeping everyone else out."  this tutorial steps through an installation of windows xp professional the way i do it:  it involves disabling a lot of annoying / unnecessary things to make your computer more secure as well as customizing a few things that microsoft didn't supply us with the ability to customize.

installing windows xp

you will of course want to start by installing windows xp.  there aren't many options here, since the install will mostly run by itself.  if you don't trust microsoft and are on broadband, i suggest not plugging in your network cable at this point.  you should be able to install simply by booting off the windows cd.  your computer is most likely already set up to boot off a cd unless you turned off that feature, in which case you should know how to turn it back on.  often booting from cd will give you a "press any key to boot from cd" message, so watch for that.

the first real option you get during installation is to decide where you want to put your windows files.  usually you will want to choose your main (c:) drive, and use the whole disk.  if there are multiple partitions on this drive, either choose one or delete them all and select the blank space.  choose your drive/partition and make sure to format it using ntfs, as this filesystem offers us the best options.  if your disk was already ntfs, you can do a quick format, but make sure you are formatting the disk so that you have a clean install.

when you are prompted to enter a computer name, you will also be asked to supply an administrator password.  for security reasons, do not leave this blank!  it's not entirely important for you to remember this password as you don't need to use this specific account, but you might want to write it down just in case.  sometimes you will actually need to log in with this account before you can create other user accounts, in which case you would definitely need to know the password.

right before the end of the installation it will probably allow you to add user accounts.  you should add at least one account to use as your main user.  if you are using this on a home network, it is a good idea to enter the usernames used on the other computers so that they can more easily access this computer.  there is no option to add passwords here, so later we will add passwords and / or change accounts to limited instead of administrator.