I want to restore Dell Inspiron laptop and give it to a friend. I have Windows XP installed in it. How can I do this? Thanks in advance.
If you have Windows XP installed on your laptop, and you want to do a factory reset, follow the steps given below. Turn on your computer and then press Ctrl+F11 keys.
The Dell logo will appear on the screen. Click on Restore and then press Enter. A warning message will be displayed notifying you about the loss of data during a Factory Reset. Confirm that you want to go ahead with the Factory Reset. After you click on Confirm, a Progress window will appear on the screen. The entire recovery process takes around 10-15 minutes, and you will be notified about a successful recovery process after it is complete.
After the message is displayed, click on Finish. The factory reset will be complete after a reboot.
If you have a laptop running on Windows XP and you want to restore it like factory resetting a phone so you can give it to a friend, unfortunately with computers, it is not possible because there is no reset or factory reset option.
If you want to restore it back to when you first use it, the only way is to format the computer and install the operating system again. Another way is to uninstall all the programs you installed and clean the registry afterwards to give it a fresh feel like no programs were ever installed as if you just installed the operating system.
But even if you do this, there will still be files and folders left on the hard drive that the programs you didn’t know use. Also, even if you clean the registry, it is not one hundred percent that all entries created by the programs will be removed.
So, if you want to bring the computer back to when you first bought it, format the hard drive and install a fresh copy of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. There are two ways to install the operating system: using the optical drive and using a USB flash drive.
To install Windows XP using a USB flash drive, try following the instructions here: I am not able to setup windows in my laptop but why.
