Unable to reset PC??

dazzlaa · 6 Feb 2017 at 18:48

Hey, thanks for taking time to read.

A friend of mine has been having serious pc performance issues for a few weeks now, he used to be able to play BF1 at 60fos medium settings no problem. (I7 920 gtx 770 )
Literally overnight his pc turned into a slug and now battlefield in particular runs like a slideshow. We updated drivers, uninstalled the card and reinstalled and it worked for a day or two before descending into mud again. So he's decided to do a windows reset on his pc but the damn thing fails every time!

Any suggestions as to why he cannot complete a reset? I'd suggest a format of the hard drive myself but windows is installed and he doesn't have a recovery partition or discs.

Orcvader · 6 Feb 2017 at 21:12

Use the tool to create a bootable USB/disk: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

And reformat with that.

dazzlaa · 7 Feb 2017 at 07:34

Thanks.....Will that keep the license intact?

Orcvader · 7 Feb 2017 at 14:22

As soon as you connect to the internet, Windows will activate itself as the licence is linked to the motherboard.

Although saying that, I seemed to have forgot to ask what version of Windows he's using

.

For 7/8/8.1 he can use something like Magic Jelly Bean to obtain the key.

Quartz · 7 Feb 2017 at 16:33

Before doing a reset you should try to figure out where the problem lies. Check Task Manager to see if any of the CPU cores are at 100% and also RAM usage, and run GPU-Z to check the GPU.

If a CPU core is at 100% check the processes tab and look for malware.

Another possibility is that the fan on the GPU is failing. Removing the card and reinserting it may have just jiggled it enough to give it some extra life. This is a quick and easy visual check, and will also show up in GPU-Z.