Reformatting a laptop:Any different from doing a desktop?

Draeger · 8 Nov 2006 at 09:09

About to go to a mates house to pick up his HP Laptop. It runs at a snails pace and although I'm going to try and clean it up for him, a reformat may be on the cards.

Never done a Laptop before, any differences between it and a desktop when it comes to reformatting?. I read somewhere that some laptop's have their BIOS stored on a partition of the hard drive???!!. Seems a bit odd to me?.

What about drivers etc?. I've asked him if he has the original disks and documentation it came with, hoping there is perhaps a system restore disk, but he knows about as much about computers as I do about astro physics, so he has no idea what discs he has. :eek:

Confused · 8 Nov 2006 at 09:12

You'll probably find there's a recovery partition on the drive, and no recovery discs. You'll have to boot to the recovery partition, which will then more than likely fire up a copy of Norton Ghost, which will put the laptop back to how it was when it left the factory.

Check this before you start erasing partitions

I found this out the hard way once

Draeger · 8 Nov 2006 at 09:21

Thanks for the heads up!!!.

Wouldnt have thought of looking for that!!.

markeh · 8 Nov 2006 at 15:47

Back in the day when we rented out laptops it was the same as PC's, just del partition, format, install windows, put on drivers etc.

Meatball · 8 Nov 2006 at 15:54

Not really but I had to create the laptop "profiles" again and enable the battery icon in the systray

AndyC · 8 Nov 2006 at 21:59

Just worth noting the network card model, these never have drivers in XP , laptops tend to have loads of drivers for just about everything, I also try and download the lot first and burn or copy them off ready for the dreaded format just makes lift a bit more easy.

Most well known makes have all drivers on their site rarly a problem.

Draeger · 8 Nov 2006 at 22:21

Ello folks, think I managed to get it running nice and fast now without the need for a reformat.

All it needed was a bit of maintenance done, startup items cut down, temp files cleaned out and a spyware/AV test run.

Then a defrag and its running quicker than ever.

So a result, but if it needs reformatting in the future, I'll know where to come for info. :cool:

Thanks again.