Reimaging my laptop. HELP!

[nate larson]

Hi,

I have a Dell Latitude D610 that is a mess right now. It is very slow and it must be infected with a bunch of spyware. I would like to wipe the whole thing clean and start over fresh. A system restore is no good because it only goes back to October and it had problems well before then. I have already backed up the things that matter to us on a USB device. How do I go about cleaning everything off and starting over fresh? I have a bunch of disks that came with the computer but I don't know what to do and which one to use. Can anyone provide step by step instructions for what I need to do? I have done some searching online with not much luck.

[deerminator]

Maybe call the dell supportline. I am no expert but I redid everything on my wife's desktop a few years back for similar reasons with great success. Basically, I backed everything up and then ran the CDs that came with the computer to redo everything. Seemed to work fine. Good luck!

[BobT]

I'm not the best one to answer your question but I think your Dell should have come with the installation CDs. If you reformat your C drive you should be able to reinstall the original software.

I'd rather someone with more experience chime in though before you consider this option.

[HawgMan]

Your computer may have a factory system restore partition in it. We have 3 Dell's (2 laptops & 1 desktop) all 3 have had to be restored. I think the laptops were pressing the F10 key on bootup & the desktop was F12. Check on the dell forums or call Dell to be sure. It worked great for us, brought each system back to the point of thie first time you powered it up.

[shnelson]

Dell has gone back and forth with recovery CD's and recovery partitions over the past few years (just like the rest of the MFG's)...

If you got a collection of disks with the machine, there's a good chance you have the restore cd.

Are any of them labeled 'Operating System Recovery' or worded with Restore in the name?

You might also need the driver CD that you load after the OS is done reinstalling.

If you don't have the installation media, try to follow the first series of screens when the machine powers up, there should be an option to invoke the restore by pressing either f2, f10 or f12. If you don't have the CD's and don't see this option pop up anywhere, you will need to contact Dell support to order a recovery disk set (ranges in price from $30 to as much as $120, I have been able to get them to provide them for free in the past but you really need to sweet talk them!).

If you are confident that you have everything backed up, the restore itself is fairly simple. Just follow the onscreen instructions and choose the option that blows everything away to give you a fresh start. There is sometimes an option to perform a repair, but this usually isn't a good idea as it just installs over the top of your already broken operating system and could cause other problems.

[simple1]

First always back up all your important files at least once a week. Second I highly recommend saving a disk image of your hd to a disk. This has several advantages to reinstalling the operating system, because you take the image when all your programs are installed. For example when you take the disk image, it will have all your important programs on your image, that you will not need to reinstall. This is a big time saver. Basically this will put your computer back to the perfect state it was in when you purchased it.

[nate larson]

Yeah this stuff is way too complicated for me. I better just call Dell and have them walk me through it. I am sure our waranty is up by now so hopefully it doesn't cost me much.

[upnorth]

Most of the time they will get you started any how. Once you get a reload started it goes pretty quick.