no OEM any advice

[ayabrea38]

http://www.theanswerb...y/Question884256.html
Chuck,Anyone,does this answer cover what you wanted.Please help,I am so scared of my computer at the mo I dare not download anything!
Formatting,although a pain,was like my safety net-what the heck,if it goes wrong/virus/gremlins-I can format the HD.Now I no longer have this and am a bit puddled off(see above post for explaination)
Any help?
Anyone?
Thanks if you can
Aya

[ChuckFickens]

if you have to format the hard drive you will be fine as there is a recovery partition on the hard drive that would allow you to restore the computer back to factory state, you can access the recovery partition by pressing f8 at startup and selecting advanced boot options and then restore computer.

If by any chance the hard drive was to fail after the warranty period for the computer was up you would be stuck and the only solutions would be to buy a new hard drive and a fresh copy of windows 7 or if you could borrow an OEM cd from somewhere you can use that and just use the license key off the sticker on your computer.

I personally don't think it's right that any computer manufacturer supplys a computer without the CD's, or at the very least an utility to burn your own recovery CD's but there is nothing stopping them from doing just that, and from looking at the zoostorm website they do quite clearly state that no recovery CD's are supplied.

[Skids]

I regularly have to re-install Windows for one reason or another. Luckily I have a Windows disk so re-installing is easy. You can use someone else's Windows disk and use your own product key, which should be on a sticker on the computer, or try a system recovery disk:

http://forums.techare...tutorials/1114725.htm

What you also need to do is back up all your personal files to a separate hard drive so you won't lose them. You can have two hard drives linked so that one is an automatic backup for the other, or you can manually back up. See here for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Remember that when you do delete all your files from your system drive that your backup is now your only copy of them. What you don't want now is for your backup drive to fail and lose that too. When your system is back up and running copy your backups back over.

I got so fed up with losing all my updated drivers and dowloaded programs that I now SAVE any driver or program I download to a folder on my back up drive before installing it. That way when I format the system drive and re-install Windows I then just go through the downloads and re-install them.

[ayabrea38]

That was my main concern,if the back up drive failed.
I am slowly getting to grips with backing up personal stuff and did already own a copy of windows 7 home premium (pro was provided with the pc)
As for the other programmes-if I lose them I do.
Thanks for answering
Aya
p.s that was my first ever 'copy and paste'link-thanks to my son for teaching me!