Cool, thanks. That was a fast reply.

Do you know if I repartition the HDD when reinstalling Windows, say it goes horribly wrong, can I still use the recovery partition on the HDD to recover?

Sorry for the newbie questions.  This is my first Dell in 10 years (last one had glorious Win 3.11).

Thanks,

Ted

There is no need to reinstall the OS. It is faster and safer to just delete what you don't want using Add/Remove in Control Panel. Lots of folk get into trouble trying a clean install.

However, just using the Add/Remove program still leaves some of the program codes in the registry, which can still mess up or slow the system.  The Reformat, and Reinstall for most is not a problem, and is the best way to get the system the way we want it.  I agree, some first times need some hand holding, but If I can do it without hand holding, than most can as well. 

Got it sorted out.  Used "Add/Remove Programs" to get rip of the trailware, "Windows Install Cleanup" to disable the startup rubbish and I bought a copy of "Partition Magic" to repartition the HDD into 3 different partitions.  Only took about an hour, which is probably about the same as a fresh install, but I'd already made lots of changes to the install so couldn't be bothered doing them again.  Some useful things I found out:

Enter BIOS - F2 (splash screen too fast to read this)
System Recovery - CTRL + F11 

Standard boot sequence starts the HDD before the CD/DVD drive, so this needs changing when using bootable CDs.

Thanks for everyones help.  All the best,

Ted

If you repartition the hard drive, Ctrl+F11 will no longer work.
You may be able to fix it using the method from http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm .

Regarding the removal of trialware, read this relevant post:
"Can't Remove Start Entry".

Ted Tingling,

You asked earlier, "Do you know if I repartition the HDD when reinstalling Windows, say it goes horribly wrong, can I still use the recovery partition on the HDD to recover?"

If you change the Master Boot Record (as you have with Partition Magic) there are some actions you must take to restore the PC Restore function. See this.

Denny,

Thanks for the link.  That could definitely help solve any headaches in the future.  I've checked that pressing CTRL + F11 still brings up the restore utility (it does), but like you suggest it might well not start the process if I were to select to restore.  In saying that, I do have the CD-ROMs, maybe I should have deleted the two restore partitions.  They made me have to make my two extra partitions logical ones.

Thanks again for the link, looks very useful.

Ted

Ted_Tingling,

If Ctrl-F11 still works, my link was not necessary, but the large restore partition is required, of course, to use PC Restore. The smaller of the partitions (~35-50MB) contains Dell diagnostics, accessible through F12 at startup.