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Solve : Can I reload my OS without the disc?? |
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Answer» I bought a Dell latitude D610 laptop from a dealer on ebay 2 years ago. It came w/Windows XP professional Version 2002 w/SP3. It's been a great puter but lately is running slow. Sometimes it's not too bad, other times it's terrible. I'm using the puter the same as always: surfing, email, word and excel files, an occasional show from hulu. I have lots of disc space. I've done all the suggestions, I think: defragging, registry cleanup, compressing files, cleaning up the hard drive, ran full-system scan w/my Norton, downloaded lavasoft adaware and ran a full system scan, uninstalled any programs I don't use including the lavasoft, erased cookies and history. If it didn't come with discs chances are you are out of luck. Sometimes the installation files are on a separate, hidden drive. However, if you format chances are you will delete this if it has one. Ignore this as it is inherently wrong...if in fact you formatted the system partition the recovery partition would remain intact unless you jumped thru all the hoops to A) Unhide the recovery partition and B) Make a conscious decision to format it as well... That being said without more info on how the laptop is setup and if you see both partitions all anyone here is doing is a bunch of guesswork at this point...Thanks so much for the info all of you. I can see I need to do more research. Dell has a good forum - I'll try that first.I've heard bad things about OEM discs: people getting ripped off or the disc is no good. What do you think? If I use one that comes w/o a product key can I just use the product key now listed for my MACHINE? Whether or not you can use the key that came with your pc depends on the disc you get. For example, if you get a disc for xp pro but your key is for xp home then the key won't work. Also as for the disc not working or getting ripped off that all depends on who you buy it from. At one company I worked for we once bought a pc with a vista upgrade cd from xp. When I tried to upgrade the installation never got passed 2%. I called them up and they SENT me a new disc (I had to return the other disc before they would send me a replacement) and that disc worked. You have yet to tell us what brand you laptop is for us to give you further guidance. As I mentioned before, if it's a Dell order the system restore disc from them. If I remember CORRECTLY it is about 15$. 15 bucks - I can handle that. My machine is a dell latitude D610 laptop. I will get a disc from Dell. I'm curious tho: I found 17 i386 file folders on my machine. 8 are described as "WINDOWS/system32/Reinst..." Two are service pack files, 2 are Java, 1 driver cache, 2 spool, 1 lib, and one a jumble of #s & letters. Is this my operating system? Thanks!!!Honestly I couldn't tell you which folder has the restore image on it. I always make sure I have the discs so I don't have to worry about this. However, you can try this link for how to restore your pc: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&docid=DC47E7957E35BBC0E030A68F27280D16&l=en&s=dhs This thread is spinning out of control... Contact Dell if you have no Recovery partition on the machine... Any CD they send you will work...contrary to the horror stories above because you have a product activation code on your Service tag sticker if it's a Dell... Max cost----8 to 12 Bucks shipping.Patio is correct. I did not mean to steer you wrong. You may also find the service tag in the BIOS.THANK you thank you everyone for all your help - I learned a lot. Will take care of it thru Dell. |
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