Recovery in vista

[Bman123]

Hey guys I got a free pc that has decent specs but its running like crap and I would like to restore it and then delete the store bought junk off of it. Its a dell dm601, pentium d 3.0ghz 2gb ram, vista 32 basic, 250gb hard drive. It's plenty for what I do but it's running really slow.

I dont have any of the recovery discs that came with it and was wondering what options do I have here. I have installed avast and super anti spyware, it erased som viruses but I want to just get this thing back to original settings so I can delete the bloat ware of of it.

I went to system restore and I can only choose a restore point from 5 days ago and thats not gonna help me none lol. SO if you can help please do so and please dont say buy a new pc as that is totally not a option right now

 

[RebateMonger]

Dell has a web page where you can order Dell OS install disks. I don't know what age cutoff they have and they may want you to be the original owner, but it wouldn't hurt to check it out.

 

[Bman123]

im not paying for this it has a recovery partition on the hard drive but i dont know how to do it

 

[Bman123]

I have no clue what's goin on with this pc, it's taking about 10 minutes now just to restart. I gotta burn this recovery DVD asap as my iPhone is acting up also. What do I have to burn exactly? I think the partition is 6gb of data, I just need to know what to burn so I can get this thing running right.

 

[Bman123]

Thanks for all the help

 

[Steltek]

Thanks for all the help

RebateMonger has told you exactly what you need to do. You said you weren't going to do that, so nothing else needed to be said.

General troubleshooting 101:

Open up the computer and carefully blow everything out with compressed air. If you got it used, it is almost certainly choked with dust (especially the CPU heatsink) given how little care most people give their PCs. While you are there, determine the hard drive manufacturer and model, and check the drive cable and power cable seatings to ensure nothing is loose.

Download a utility from that hard drive manufacturer (choose one that you can use to create a bootable CD - you may need to do this on another PC) to check your hard drive to make sure it isn't failing. If it shows a fault, you need to back up that hard drive ASAP to save the restore partition. If you trigger the restore utility on a failing hard drive, you could cause it to fail and then you'll really be screwed.

If the hard drive checks out, you might also want to download and run MEMTEST to check for memory faults.

Once everything checks out, you can try to trigger the factory restore process. I'm just guessing here, as you didn't provide a proper Dell model number. While booting up, a blue bar with www.dell.com should appear at the top of the screen. Try to repeatedly press F8 until you get a screen that presents you with, among other options, "Repair your computer". Select this one, and on the next page it should ask you to select the userID and password for your Vista administrator account (if you don't have a password, leave it blank). The next window presented should have a "Dell Factory Image Restore" option. Select that option, and leave it alone while it runs. If everything works properly, you'll be back to a fresh factory image install within about an hour.

If this works, at first boot you need to generate a set of restore CDs/DVDs - there should be software on the PC installed by Dell to do this. Then install security updates and you should be good to go.