Time to get clean!

[gigagaia]

But I have a laptop... I think my computer is running really choppy these days and needs a clean sweep and refresh, but alas, I'm not sure how to format and reinstall windows on a laptop, as i don't have a pure windows CD, just a "windows restore disk." I wonder if this is the same thing....

any thoughts or suggestions?

[drak10687]

Hmm, I'm not sure how those work, but have you tried just putting it in, and booting via CD? You can try that, and see what options it gives you and if they are similar to that of a "pure" windows CD...

[Spart]

Well, I got the picture that those restore discs are pretty useless (=hard to use). My friend had the same problem when he had already formated the hard drive, he couldn't get Windows installed and just bought Vista.
Here's a website about this: http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articl...overy_disk.htm
So I cannot help you there any further. Would be nice if you had a friendly vendor who you bought that laptop from. Well, that's about all the legal ways to solve it.

So, how long has your laptop been unformated? Usually formating isn't that inevitable, although I try to do it like once in a year maybe.
You could defrag your hard drive, run various spyware detectors/antivirus programs, find some nice registry cleaning programs and clean away all the unnecessary crap that usually piles up. You can find useful programs with Google, or here.
If you're lucky, you don't even have to format the whole thing.

Well, that's about all I can do.

[drak10687]

I've read that if the computer that you bought came with the OS (ie. you bought the OS as well), you have the right to demand a CD containing the whole OS since, after all, you did buy it...

[Erik]

I've read that if the computer that you bought came with the OS (ie. you bought the OS as well), you have the right to demand a CD containing the whole OS since, after all, you did buy it...

Yes, that makes sense.
It might even be legal to crack/circumvent the copy protection (I'm fairly convinced that this is legal in my country, but we have very consumer friendly copyright laws compared to most other western countries).

Sadly you can't use your CD key on just any copy of windows.
I've tried that once on my mom's PC, when her windows CD was damaged.
So unless you can find someone who has the exact same version of Windows that was used on your laptop this won't work without cracking the copy protection.