Is A Windows 7 Reformatting Necessary?

Well, everyone...I called Asus tech support and although I bought my computer 3 years ago, they were nice enough to walk me through the recovery.

Even though now I have back ups of everything, I opted to do the recovery via the Recovery Partition (F9 on my laptop). Yes, it came with some bloatware, but they are minimal and I already deleted them.

My computer also asked me to do a backup of my laptop, as it now looks like out-of-the-box new, and now that I'm burning the DVD/R for the Recovery, it's taking a good 1.5 hours and 3 DVD/R's. Before, prior to recovery and when the OS was unstable, it took 1 DVD/R and only 3 minutes to burn. So I'm thinking, something was not right with that first recovery disc.

But thanks to you guys, now I also have back ups of all my drivers, ISO, etc. so in case this happens again, I'm prepared!

Thanks again!!

Hi Holly -

Just deleting bloatware is not enough since it can be as problematic once it's removed. Look over the other steps here to Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

I also would not use a driver finder program. Instead run all rounds of Important and Optional Windows Updates after enabling Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3).
This should provide the drivers Win7 wants, but if not import them from the Support Downloads webpage for your PC model.

Oh my goodness...I have no recollection of linking to the free drivers scan site, but I must have done? I was extremely tired when I posted that, so I'm sorry. lol So strange!

I have gone through and actually removed the bloatware from my laptop. Some of it is performance-related and by Asus, and those...I don't mind. But I did remove the Google things, and antivirus that came preloaded, etc.

The thing that actually took the LONGEST in all of this was trying to get my iPod music back onto my laptop. Not because of the laptop but because iTunes doesn't allow that reverse reload, so I went through numerous softwares, and much work and I still don't have everything. I already had my music folder backed up to my external drive before the recovery, but it was going to be missing tons of tags and I was not going to re-do those. If there is an easier/sure way of putting my iPod music back onto my laptop/via iTunes, I'd love to know about it.

I'm actually not going to load most of my other software on my laptop because it's nice to have so much free space. I'll just load things as needed, or just go off my external HD otherwise.

Thanks, Greg!