Kev
My laptop (a Compaq Presario C700)came with a recovery partition that didn't work. It had an option to create a recovery CD from the aforementioned, which also didn't work. It claimed that it couldn't find a DVD writer.
Rather than go to HP and pay them £30 for a set of recovery CDs, I reinstalled from my Vista CD, registering it with the licence key on the bottom of the laptop, and downloaded hardware-specific drivers from the HP website beforehand.
The system booted up fine first go, and I installed all the drivers I got from HP which took about 10 minutes including reboots. Everything works perfectly, plus I don't have gigabytes of bloat that HP/PC World seemed to think I would need.
My laptop (a Compaq Presario C700)came with a recovery partition that didn't work. It had an option to create a recovery CD from the aforementioned, which also didn't work. It claimed that it couldn't find a DVD writer.
Rather than go to HP and pay them £30 for a set of recovery CDs, I reinstalled from my Vista CD, registering it with the licence key on the bottom of the laptop, and downloaded hardware-specific drivers from the HP website beforehand.
The system booted up fine first go, and I installed all the drivers I got from HP which took about 10 minutes including reboots. Everything works perfectly, plus I don't have gigabytes of bloat that HP/PC World seemed to think I would need.