tigggerish

Ok...I need help. First off please keep in mind i am no computer genious or even close so any help in plain terms would be awesome.

ok so here is the situation...My friend just gave me their dell laptop mini inspiron 700m...there are a couple issues...

one...there are so many viruses on it that i can get to the home screen but none of the icons or even start menu come up..so it is basically not even usuable to click on anything. I DO NOT need to save any of his old stuff so if i could just wipe it completely clean and retsart the whole dang computer over again that would be great. The problem there is that I do not have a disk with windows or anything that came woth the computer AND i cannot access the start menu or anything else. Please help me figure out step by step what to do...i dont want to take it somewhere and spend a lot of money...i would rather do it myself. i read somewhere to restore to orginal system defaults...but how? and does that wipe out a virus?? also..i cant even get to the start menu.

two...the battery on it is an F5136 (says no recall on my research) and the laptop wont stay on unless it is actually plugged into the wall...so i dont know if it is the battery or something more serious....

Please Help smart people!!!!

Thanks!!!!

Ryan2065

Your friend should have the CDs that came with the laptop originally and you can reinstall everything from there. If he doesn't have them anymore, he might be able to call Dell and squeeze a spare XP cd out of them if he complains to the right person.

I don't know what you can do to test the battery if you don't have another battery to test or another computer to test it in... Maybe someone else knows of a trick to try.

Mikhalkov

Pertaining to the battery-
Since this is a hand-me-down laptop, the battery has probably reached the end of it's life span. Batteries typically last around 2-3 years, so if your friend bought it a while ago, that's probably what's going on.

As for the reinstall-
You will need a Windows CD, so ask your friend about it or call up Dell like Ryan said. If you aren't able to get one, you'll end up having to buy one. Anyway, once you have a disk, put it in the CD drive and shut down the computer. Turn it back on and before you see the Windows logo with the loading bar, you will need to hit some key (usually Esc, Del, or one of the F keys) to try and get into the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). From there, navigate through the menus until you can find the boot priorities of your devices. These should include things like your hard drive, your CD drive, etc. Move the CD drive to be first on the list and save and exit. Then it should boot to the installation CD where you can format the hard drive and reinstall. You may be able to skip this and go into another menu that let's you just select the CD drive and boots.

I know the instructions from off the top of my head are very poor, and this process is hardly intuitive for basic users. Remember, google is your friend, so it would be good if you just googled "how to boot to a cd" or "how to format (XP, Vista, whatever you're using)"

TriggerFinger

Try the instructions for DELL here Laptop Recovery Instructions

The instructions will work if you still have the original HDD that came with the laptop when you bought it. Btw, it is assumed you have backed up your important files already.

In the recovery process, you will be asked if you want to format the partition or not. Basically by default it has 2 partitions. One is the C: drive and the other partition is the recovery partition. You can of course format the C: drive (DO NOT FORMAT the RECOVERY partition) using DBAN.

Assuming you have done the formatting of the C: drive/partition, follow the instructions on how to do a recovery using the RECOVERY partition.