New hard drive or reformat?

i think when all's done and said youll going to need to do a refomate to the drive.so you should just save your self some time and do it now.
no disresepct to the others that are trying to help you but i think it will be much easyer to just start over clean . reason being that you have about 120 gb of space not acounted for and 80 gb of backups that you or your friend no whats backed up on it.anyway save yourself some time and just reformate..
good luck
scrooge

As I said much earlier on I would do an F8 boot into safe mode and determine that it boots in a sensible time.
Backup all important data onto another external HDD. My guess is that there is a factory recovery partition to get the computer back to factory condition. This may be the closest to a clean install you can do. This will delete data and any software installed after purchase.

Factory restore for an HP is generally F11 or via the inbuilt recovery manager.

All the better if you have installation disks.

If it's an HP it is larded with bloatware to begin with. This is not even close to a clean install. I would wipe the HD and clean reinstall with a Vista or Win7 installation DVD.

Here are steps to get a perfect reinstall of factory bloated preinstall: re-install windows 7

You can even extract favorite apps from HP Recov Disks using this method: https://www.sevenforums.com/installat...tml#post488270

If you need time to buy Win7 or find a Vista installer, here are tips to tame bloatware: HP laptop has used up all four primary partitions

Remember that if your hardware checks out and is decent, a clean install (especially of Win7) is actually better than getting a new computer today since they load them with sponsored bloatware, and now enforce it by refusing to provide an OS DVD as required by MS.

greg I agree about the bloatware and i dislike hp for their use of the recovery drive I think it just adds clutter to a computer. I think in the end instead of toyying with it im going to go with reformattign the ahrd drive with the data on an external. My question to you guys is. Shoul;d i just trnasfer all his documents over to the external that he wnats to keep or should i use like windows backup? hes msot worried about his quickbook tax fiules but he ahs the software to install them again so i figure i just have to save the files and rel;oad quickbooks right?

Yes, google to find exact location of Quickbooks data file which may be in Documents, as I recall.

Back up everything externally. Don't forget IE Favorites which are now a User file. You can get everything by backing up the Active User folder, or just the sub-folders with content.

If you are going to format the HD anyway, then wipe it instead to overwrite all code. Just follow the steps here and you'll get a purrfect install: re-install windows 7

Your friend's computer hopefully still has the COA sticker and you know someone with a set if install disks. Without his own set of install disks he will need to make reliable image asap after installing because that will be his only fallback.

His computer should have the coa sticker on it still. Also I have the vista home premium cd. I am thinking about making it into a usb key instead to go faster. Also should I use windows backup that comes on vista or just simply copy over all the files and paste them back after the reformats done?

supermasterpig said:

His computer should have the coa sticker on it still. Also I have the vista home premium cd. I am thinking about making it into a usb key instead to go faster. Also should I use windows backup that comes on vista or just simply copy over all the files and paste them back after the reformats done?

I assume you are talking about personal data and NOT Windows files?

If you are going to wipe the drive and reformat, I'd just copy the stuff off to another drive with the mouse. Why get bogged down in Windows Backup for this case?

As disorganized as the user is, it may be difficult for you to guess where all the data is. Don't forget bookmarks and email if any.

You have given up on trying to account for the poor performance and high processes? If so, the problem may return soon enough.

ignatzatsonic- I will still check the process and try to figure out how it got this way. The best guess I have at the moment is that it got ful of god knows what when his whole fmaily was using it (3 teenage sons). Everyone now has their own computers and I havnt heard anything bad about those. I dont think its something he just did as he has a laptop he suses for both home and work and there is nothing that sticks out to me as poor maintence, the reason i dont think its him and it was his kids was that his work laptop is not nearly as cluttered and does not have 10 thousand programs on it like his home computer. I should also mention its an early version of vista as it came with 1 gb of ram to begin with.