Restoring laptop to factory state, and need help reinstalling/reactivating office,etc

Hi majorgeeks,

I've been using my laptop for a year or more now, and I have been having some graphics card issues (getting it to update drivers without killing my system)...and I have tried multiple things to no avail. Lenovo, the maker of my IBM Thinkpad T60p laptop suggested that I system restore (which has me now at my okay state, there are some display issues but its fine), then if sys restore didnt work, i should restore to factory state (a feature on my thinkvantage laptop)...then if that doesn't work, send the laptop back to them to replace the graphics card or fix it there...(for free under my long warranty)...


Method one didn't work, so I am restoring my system to factory state...
and I would like some help with my transfer to recreating my system...
I have written down all the programs I have, and have backed up my music, documents, video, etc. to my external hard drive.
I also have office 2003 and adobe creative suite 2...they both have product keys...how do I go about reinstalling them?
I have yet to do anything, so I'm going to get a list I can print out and follow during the recreation of the system...

Obviously after I restore the laptop, I would assume that the first thing to do is get my antivirus up and antispyware...and run windows/microsoft/system updates... firefox reinstalled...then reinstall office and adobe cs2...then my cinema 4d...then the rest of my programs (winamp, last fm, ccleaner, iobit defrag, trillian) and my printer, camera drivers...external hardrive, mouse are plug and play though so no problem there....

Am I on the right track? And again, how do I transfer the office and adobe cs2 without running into the activation key problems? I have the registration keys and product keys for both, I just want to make sure I don't get conflicts when re-installing it...

 

Re: Restoring laptop to factory state, and need help reinstalling/reactivating office

I don't want to talk you out of restoring the system, sometimes it's the best thing to do. You might try some of the things in the link below just to see if it helps.

http://www.modernstreet.com/general/ati2dvag-problem/

Steve

 

Re: Restoring laptop to factory state, and need help reinstalling/reactivating office

Holy crap...wow three years old problem...dang
Well I'll try these other solutions first...then if thats completely useless I'll do the system restore...what's weird though is that people were complaining this happens when they play games...I play Half Life 2 and dont get errors, only when I was on a certain art heavy site...but now that's stopped...i still have some glitchy little flickers at startup and what not. But yeah I wanna get this "fixed" if thats possible before school starts...haha and i'm also downloading the bioshock demo which I want to actually play...lol...but seriously this is an actual problem why doesn't anyone do anything? Thanks Matacumbie for the link! I will try this before the restore...you may have saved me some time and downloads...