Dell PC Restore

Good Afternoon,

I have a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop running XP. I've run through all of your procedures for malware removal twice and nothing comes up. However it runs so horribly slow that I'm not convinced it's clean. My girlfriend uses it and I think she's got it FUBAR'd so I want to dump everything and start over.

Dell has a PC Restore option that supposedly returns the machine to it's "as-shipped" condition. Is this the best way to go? And if there is an infection somewhere will this clear it? Long ago I ran the process with the help of a Dell representative and he had me run a number of commands to wipe everything. I don't know what the commands were and I don't want to pay them for support, especially when most of the time I can't understand what the person is saying. What do you recommend?

Thanks everyone!

 

Hey Cpt. Jazz!

To answer your question, I think a reformat of your Dell's hard drive is the only way to go. Or even buying a new HDD would definitely help as well! It's the only truly way to know if your hard drive does not have any malware/trojan/spyware crap on it....cause it's brand new! Plus laptop hard drive's are faster, can carry more information and are sturdier than laptop drives of the olden days. You know, from like 4 months ago. :-D

My parents have a Dell Inspiron 1720 that was purchased last summer. Over time the darn thing started running so slow that they finally gave up and called Dell support last week. Long story short, I called and was on the phone with "Rick" the nice broken-English Indian Dell rep from no-man's land for about 3 hours trying different "tricks" to get this thing to speed. If I had it my way, I would have reformated the laptop initially but to amuse my parents and the "awesome" 2yr. Dell warranty, I called on their behalf. So, finally after an exhaustive troubleshooting session, the Dell rep recommended a full reformat of the PC......for only $210. WTF!?!? Why does it cost that much to reformat the hard drive and reinstall a bunch of drivers? A small baby goat can do that. So I told "Rick" this was ludacrous and that he already wasted half of my Saturday. So I decided to reformat the laptop myself and bought the Dell Vista install disc from him over the phone for $20......which is also a croc for a CD filled with the Dell tainted Vista installation software. I already have a Vista Operating System CD that I tried to use in order to reformat the laptop, but it didn't work.

Ugh....I told my wife that if there were to be a nuclear holocaust, the only 3 remaining companies left would be Dell, McDonalds and Walmart. Darn monopoly businesses...they can all burn!!!

Anyway, I basically bought an external hard drive (500GB), copy & pasted all my 'rents personal stuff onto it and then proceeded to reformat the hard drive. Then I found the "Dell Applications" CD that came with the laptop and downloaded the chipset, video, audio & webcam (gotta use the 'cam for Skype don'tcha know) drivers. After about an hour of this I had a brand-new, faster running Dell laptop!

So, I really think it pays to reformat the hard drive and start fresh. All those "wares" out there are sneaky Petes and can hide files in the deepest, darkest parts of a hard drive. Even a reformat is not 100%.....but it's free, so I would try that first! Just remember to copy all your personal files onto another drive.....I lost a whole bunch of vacation pics by not doing so. This was 3yrs. ago and I'm still mad for it!

Hope this gives you some insight!