Vista has been deleted from my laptop and i have no disk

[wickedtart19]

my daughter has deleted the programme vista from her laptop, and has no running disk, can she restore this by doing a system restore, or does she need to go out and buy the programme. I have windows xp, so coud i load that onto her laptop? many thanks

[ChuckFickens]

You won't be able to do a system restore, you may be able to do a recovery back to factory settings, but as you've not mentioned any details about the laptop it's impossible to advise.

You can install XP from the CD you have provided you have the license key, it is not installed on any other computer and XP drivers are available for the laptop (again as you choose to keep details secret I can't advise)

[ChuckFickens]

(BTW, how on earth did they manage to delete the operating system?)

[wickedtart19]

my daughter was tidying up her laptop lol, she was like this when she was young always messing around, lol what details do u need please, as i am going over to hers later with my xp disks, should i try resetting it to default do you think that would work, many thanks for oyu help

[ChuckFickens]

Make and model number of the laptop would help as all are different on how to restore back to default.

[wickedtart19]

HP COmpact dont know where to find other number

[ChuckFickens]

HP's normally come with a set of recovery CD's that would enable you to restore the system back to factory, they are normally labelled "HP recovery plus" and "HP operating system"

If you have these it's easy to restore the laptop back to how it came from HP. if you've not got these then you are going to have problems and my need to buy windows again.

[society]

Chuck, I am a bit confused so I have a few questions. I don't know windows7, only XP so bear with me, and forgive me if my questions are daff.

Wicked tart said 'and has no running disk, ' is she referring to the recovery disk?

If the operating system has been deleted how will they be able to do a system recovery?

[ChuckFickens]

I assumed that by "no running disks" meant they had no recovery disks. (although as per my last post they may have them and not realise as they are not labelled in an obvious way)

A system recovery is different to a system restore, a restore will just wind the clock back a bit and take the system back to a state it was in a few days (or weeks) before. but by deleting the OS they can no longer do a restore.

A recovery will wipe the entire system and re-install the software and take it back to "as supplied from the factory"

[society]

Thank you for that ChuckFickens. :-)