Hi,

Lately my Studio 17 laptop (windows 7, 64-bit) has been extremely slow and although it could be a hardware issue I figured that a full reinstall (or recovery) wouldn't hurt. The problem is however that my laptop didn't come with an installation disc, so I am forced to use the built in recovery method.

At first, the 'Dell factory image restore' option didn't show up in the 'System recovery options', which I got to by bashing F8 during start up. So I used an alternative method of manually opening the recovery 'program'. I opened the command promt and (I believe) I typed in: "x:\tools\pcrestore.exe".

This initially seemed to work. A recovery program was running and I was asked whether I agreed with me losing all my personal data (which was what I wanted). This 'reinstallation' ran for about 45-60 minutes and after entering my computer and account name it rebooted and started up the fresh windows 7.

The problem however, is that my hard drive seems to have NOT been fully formatted. All of my programs and other files are still present on the hard drive, although not working, probably due to the OS being reinstalled.

Is this what the recovery is supposed to do? I believed that a recovery would return my laptop to the state it was in when I first got it, so without anything I put on it myself. Is there any way of fully formatting my pc, while at the same time returning it to factory settings?

Thanks in advance, Tim