reformatt on store bought system

[InFlames_44]

Hey guys, my aunt wants me to clean her pc up a bit
thats no problem..i think its gona end up in a formatt by the sounds of it
But my question is, its store bought, so i mean..won't drivers be a problem?
Im quite sure it didn't come with cds with drivers on them
will installing xp do the trick?

 

[PC eye]

Without recovery disks provided by the manufacturer and still under any warranty you would first want to get those through the dealer/vendor. Once you tamper with things a warranty would then be void! If any extended sercive plan is already expired you would then have to know the make and model to download the updates for the board as well as the hardwares like video and sound cards it came with.

 

[Cromewell]

To get the drivers for a store bought computer do the same thing you would to get the drivers for a home build system: go to the manufacturer. HP/Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc. All these companies have websites that will let you download all the drivers for a given model. If XP doesn't install drivers for the network card on it's own, download the NIC driver with another PC and use a flash drive to transfer it.

 

[PC eye]

The first thing besides insuring no warranty is stil in effect would be to backup anything important off of the drive before wiping it regardless. Plus you have to consider whether or not to remove an existing recovery partition on a preinstalled system. Once that is gone you won't ne able to use any recovery disks the manufacturer would provide. You will want a full install disk for the machine there. Removing and repartitioning the drive along with simply installing a fresh copy of Windows is the easy part after.