gateway desktop hangs on office 2010 after "restore operating sytem to

After several attemps of trying to " restore operating system to factory defaults". The computer hangs at 16/24 instilling office 2010. I have tried to restart the process and always the same thing. I called acer and gateway and both want 200.00 or so to help wipe the drive clean and reinstall all of the programs. When I bought the desktop new from bestbuy it came with no recovery disks. Can anyone help with this issue?

Do you want to do a clean install?

You can likely do that, but it would leave you without Office 2010 and whatever else Acer may have put on the machine before it was shipped.

What's wrong the with PC that causes you to want to restore to factory defaults?

A clean ibstall? Like back to when it was new? I caught a virus in the system and nothing was working. I tried several ways to get it out. But with no luck. So I listened to a friend and tried this way.

So how do i clean this comp and get it back to when it was new?

charleslulak said:

A clean ibstall? Like back to when it was new?

Not to like it was when Gateway or Acer shipped it to you.

But you may prefer a clean install anyway. You would download a legal ISO file from a Microsoft partner, burn the ISO to a disk, and install from that disk. You would activate the installation with the Product Key that should be found on a Certificate Of Authenticity sticker somewhere on the PC. This costs nothing.

A clean install would include a fresh legal installation of Windows 7. It would EXCLUDE any other software that Gateway or Acer put on the PC before it was shipped to you. Stuff like anti-virus, Office, and various doo-dads.

Many people don't like all that extra crap anyway. A lot of it you may be able to download from Gateway. Nearly all of it can be replaced for little or nothing by superior software after you do the clean install.

I'd think the major exception for you may be Office, but maybe you have an Office installation disc already? Or maybe you had only a trial edition of Office?

The alternative is to somehow get your recovery partition to work. I can't help you with that.

Im not worried about office. That's just where it stalled. And is this a better way or does the comp run better faster etc.and what about the graffics card audio etc? I really dont know much about comps.

Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

Above is tutorial on this site on how to do a clean install in your situation.

There would be less clutter and unwanted applications after a clean install. Instead of having the stuff that was on it when you bought it, you'd have only Windows.

Graphics cards, audio, etc shouldn't be a problem. The drivers for those things are contained in Windows itself and would be installed when you do the Windows installation from the burned disc.

I would go to Gateway and download their NIC driver (Ethernet driver) and save it on a USB thumb drive or CD. It should be provided by Windows anyway, but it's just a precaution because the most important thing for you is to have a working Internet connection after a clean install and you need this NIC driver to do that.

Most importantly: do you have a Certificate Of Authenticity sticker with a 25 character Product Key somewhere on the PC? If you don't, you can't activate your clean install.

If you do the clean install, you will lose all of your personal data on the PC. So you have to back that stuff up if it means anything to you. A clean install wipes the C partition clean.

Yes. I have the key. Thank you. Ill try it.

Someone else here may be able to help you do a recovery instead of a clean install.

That's normally done from a hidden partition on your hard drive and I guess is what you have tried to do and failed.

But the second method is to burn a set of recovery discs and then recover using those disks. I'm not familiar with that procedure, but it might work even though your recovery attempt using the hidden partition failed.

So--you might want to wait and see if anyone can help you with that. It's probably done from a menu or the control panel on your PC.

But--you may want to do a clean install anyway and that's fine and maybe preferable if you don't need all the extra junk that came with the PC.

Ok. I guess ill wait and see if someone knows how to fix this issue, but if not ill use your repair option.