Majorly screwed up my laptop - please help

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right place or not.

I really badly need help. I have an Acer laptop that had Vista on it and I received no disks when I purchased it, it was all just stored on the laptop.

Anyway, I've had trouble with it recently with viruses etc and it wouldn't let me restore it to factory default. Yes I know it was at this point I should have asked for help before I screwed it up even further.

Anyway, I had a Windows XP disk so I decided just to delete everything off the laptop completely and instal Windows XP onto it.

I did that successfully BUT......

now I have no wifi and quite possibly some other things that I need.

I tried downloading drivers from the Acer website but I really have no idea what I'm doing.

So I'm wondering if anyone can suggest the easiest way for me to fix this, whether I just need a driver or whether I need to start from scratch again, I have no idea.

Any suggestions and help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

 

What model is the laptop (from the tag on the bottom)?

Try

How many partitions do you see on your HD/Disk 0 in the graph? What are the sizes?

What exactly was the problem when trying to restore to factory settings? As much as you can remember.

 

The model laptop is an Acer Aspire 5570Z

There are 3 partitions:

1. PQSERVICE 7.81GB NTFS
2. C: 33.51GB NTFS
3. DATA D: 33.21GB NTFS

I wanted to do a restore because I believed it had a virus, I kept getting Internet Explorer popping open and my C: was also almost full despite not having many programs installed other than the basics.

I had Nortons which wasn't picking up any viruses, perhaps I should have run a malware program or something.

Stupid thinking, I just thought it best to restore it completely and start afresh.

 

It looks like things aren't too bad. The PQService may be the recovery partition. Also there are drivers for XP on the Acer site.

I think you have two options:
Stick with XP and download the missing drivers or try to use the recovery partition to reinstall factory defaults.

How did you try to restore defaults the first time using <alt> and <F10>?

 

No, just using the Acer Empowering links on the desktop. The Alt F10 isn't working now, it just keeps on going past so I'm assuming perhaps I've deleted the hidden recovery files.

I have tried downloading the XP drivers but couldn't get anything to work

 

There is one caveat in the manual about setting D2D Recovery to enabled in BIOS [(F2) at boot up to enter BIOS]. Before rebooting and trying Alt +F10. See pic 1. If the recovery partition works it would be simplest because all the drivers would be installed.

****
When you downloaded the XP drivers from ACER did you set the OS marker to XP? it is set to Vista by default. You would start with the chipset driver. Did you try more than one WAN driver?

 

Where would I set the OS marker to XP? I have the D2D is enabled but still doesn't work.

 

In the second pic the arrow points to the OS line.

I'm guessing you formatted the recovery partition since it is NTFS. Usually it is a differnt file system.

 

The XP drivers on the Acer site don't have a wifi driver - not that I can find anyway

Edit: scrap that, I just hadn't scrolled down

 

WAN is your Wireless Area Network. That is what you need. I'm not sure which one but I would get the chipset driver and install it then try the Intel Wireless LAN driver.

Edit: Since you have XP installed SIW or Everest Home Edition might be able to tell you which wireless chip/card you have.

 

Oh yes I had XP on the Acer site, sorry I thought you meant I needed to change something on my laptop to XP.

Ok, I am just downloading all the drivers now and then will try again at installing them and see how I go.

Thanks for your help