Recovery disk from recovery partition?

If you've restored it to factory settings now you should be able to make new recovery discs as mentioned earlier. Do that (so you don't need a recovery partition as you can always reinstall from the recovery discs which is the same thing as restoring from the recovery partition).

Then when you've made the recovery discs, do a clean install. There is probably a lot of bloatware in the original installation. There's a tutorial on here for clean install of Windows 7. You can download the ISO now I believe, and then just enter the product key from the base of the computer to activate.

I just did a clean install the other day and found it better to activate after doing the windows updates as lack of drivers before the updates was making the laptop crash trying to activate. It worked fine after the windows updates were done.

Windows will download the drivers - probably all of them. You can check to see if any are missing afterwards (there might be the odd one - eg for an sd card slot) and get that driver from the Dell website afterwards.

A clean install should speed things up. It did on mine.

Another way to speed it up is increase the RAM - you maybe have the minimum ram in it. Check on the crucial website for your model of laptop and it will tell you the maximum ram the laptop will take. It's worth buying extra ram as it does speed things up.