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Restoring a Laptop to Factory Condition

  • 05-11-2005 12:26pm
    #1
    ucd_guy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 111 ✭✭


    I bought a budget laptop last February from Dell, an Inspiron 500m. Does the job - light and the wireless card works well for me!

    Last week I won a top of the range IBM Thinkpad in a raffle in Dublin, (delighted!) so I'm going selling my Dell to my sister.

    Thing is, it's loaded down with all the crap I have on it. The harddrive's near full, and (like a fool!) I loaded up loads of extraneous and unnecessary programs, so it takes an age and a day to start up as well.

    Now, (A) I don't want to be mean to my sister and (B) I have some personal info on the computer, from work, so I'd like to restore the computer to factory condition.

    I presume this means reinstalling Windows. Is this a big job? Do I need to reformat the hard drive as well? I'm kinda stuck for time lately with exams... Anyone like to give me any advice/info/tips?

    Cheers!


Comments

  • #2
    Sparky
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 22,231 ✭✭✭✭Sparky


    there should be a restore partition on that dell, and afaik its done by pressing Ctrl and F11 together when the blue dell.com bar appears at startup.

    It contains a stripped down version of norton ghost that wipes your HDD and reinstalls all the factory data back to Day1, and should take no longer than 5 mins, when you reboot your lappy it will show the windows screens promting you to enter your final settings like name and computer name.
    Just like when you took it out of the box :D


  • #3
    irlrobins
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,541 ✭✭✭irlrobins


    What Sparky said.

    Winning an IBM Thinkpad, nice!!!


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