My sister recently bought a new laptop so I decided to take her old one off her hands and use it as a secondary computer (mostly for storage unit). It is a Dell Inspiron B130 that is roughly 5-6 years old now. It came with Windows XP built in. However her clever boytoy decided to install Windows 7 in the machine and without obvious observation this computer is not meant to run Win7. I upgraded the RAM years ago for her but despite the memory increase, it lacks both HDD and processing power to efficiently run Win7. The funny thing from it all is that this boytoy is a computer engineer.
Anyways, I am not sure if DELL still does this today but at the time when she bought this one and I bought my DELL the previous year it came with XP built into a partition into the HDD. Neither computer came with XP software rather it was hidden in the HDD. When you wanted to reformat you would have to hit CTRL F11 on the start up screen.
I want to reformat this B130 back to factory settings however I have learned that once the Windows software is either upgraded (like to Windows 7) that it deletes the built in partition of XP. This renders the CTRL F11 function useless now. I then proceeded to use an XP disc I have lying around to see if that would work.
However whenever I insert the XP disc, the option to convert down to XP is faded out, or in other words, inactive. I am unable to convert it down to XP. It is a legitimate XP disc.
I have 2 questions:
1) How do I get this to go back to XP?
2) When downgrading back to XP, I will be able to reformat the computer in the process correct?
Thanks for any help.
Anyways, I am not sure if DELL still does this today but at the time when she bought this one and I bought my DELL the previous year it came with XP built into a partition into the HDD. Neither computer came with XP software rather it was hidden in the HDD. When you wanted to reformat you would have to hit CTRL F11 on the start up screen.
I want to reformat this B130 back to factory settings however I have learned that once the Windows software is either upgraded (like to Windows 7) that it deletes the built in partition of XP. This renders the CTRL F11 function useless now. I then proceeded to use an XP disc I have lying around to see if that would work.
However whenever I insert the XP disc, the option to convert down to XP is faded out, or in other words, inactive. I am unable to convert it down to XP. It is a legitimate XP disc.
I have 2 questions:
1) How do I get this to go back to XP?
2) When downgrading back to XP, I will be able to reformat the computer in the process correct?
Thanks for any help.