question regarding factory reset

searchlight123

i have a 4.5 year old acer aspire 5536 laptop which has been faultless.
i think it would benefit from a full restore but my question is when i bought this laptop (feb 2010) it was running windows vista but came with a voucher to obtain free upgrade to windows 7 home premium which i did at the time around april / may 2010.
my question is, if i do a factory restore would my laptop revert back to vista or stay on windows 7?
also apart from backing up my data (done it!!) how do i go about restoring it to factory settings.
many thanks for any advice.

Brain_Dead

If you do a factory restore from the recovery partition it will put it back to Vista (as that is how it came from the factory)

However, If you got the windows 7 upgrade disk you can boot from that and do a fresh install from it, which would be my preference anyhow as it will be a clean install without any of the rubbish installed by Acer that you don't need.

The downside of using the DVD is it probably won't install all the drivers the system needs so you will need to download them from acer and put them on a USB stick ready to install after you've installed windows.

Google acer drivers and you'll find where to download the drivers.


To boot from the DVD stick it in the drive, restart the computer and tap F12 while it's starting (before you see windows loading)

searchlight123

Many thanks for reply. Just so that I am clear if I just boot to the Acer win 7 upgrade disc that will give me the option of a clean install without me doing anything else?
I believe I was given an acer drivers disc with the win 7 one so that part of it should not be an issue.

Brain_Dead

Yes....

You will need the windows 7 key which should have come with the upgrade disk.

when you get the option during the install select custom, then you'll get the option of where to install it, I'd click drive options, then select the main drive partition (the largest one) and delete it, then select the "unallocated space" and click next. (warning... this really will remove everything so make sure you have got everything you want backed up!)

You'd be better off downloading the drivers as they will probably have been updated since you got the driver disk.

Also, after the install run windows update over and over until there are no more (probably take 3 or 4 times and, depending on internet speed, several hours!..)

OH, and finally, at the first stage of the install make sure to change the time and currency format from English (US) to English (UK)

searchlight123

Thanks again for this helpful advice.