Best way to do a total restore

[breezyseaz]

After doing some more searching around on the laptop I found it has a full recovery built in. I've done that but won't know until tomorrow after my son uses it if it's back like it was originally.

(first post I posted) This is my sons laptop, he's in the Marines and this laptop has been in Afghanistan and used for lots of music etc. and he's home now and I'd like to restore it back to like it was when new. It has become slow/lags in the past week.

Hewlett-Packard
Pavilion dm4 notebook
Windows 7 Home Premium
Intel Core i5 CPU M430 @2.27GHz 2.27GHz
Memory 4GB
64 bit

I do not want Microsoft office on here I'd like to run openoffice.
I use Comodo firewall and avast antivirus (both I'm sure are out of date)

 

[nismo91]

According to hp, that model should have recovery-partition built-in and HP recovery manager software inside Windows 7. There are 3 types of recovery:

System Recovery: Reformats the system drive (normally C, re-installs the original operating system, all the original hardware drivers and software. Does not impact user created partitions. If there are two hard drives, only the drive with the operating system is modified.
WARNING: If the size of the OS partition (normally C was reduced below a minimum size requirement, the other user created partions will be removed and stored data will be destroyed.
Factory Reset: Removes all partitions, reformats the entire hard drive, re-installs the original operating system, and all the original hardware drivers and software. Also, re-creates the required Recovery partition (normally D and UEFI partition (normally E, and re-installs the required software.
This Factory Reset option returns all of the notebook's software to the condition it was in at the time of purchase. All user changes or additions are removed.
Minimized Image Recovery: Removes all partitions, reformats the entire hard drive, re-installs the original operating system and hardware drivers, and re-installs HP essential software (i.e., HP Support Assistant, HP Recovery Manager, etc.), but does not install the trial applications and games.

Additionally there are 3 methods of recovery: press F11 to perform immediate recovery, using hp recovery software inside windows, or using recovery discs.

all of them are described here: hp support page

dont forget to double-check your backup before performing recovery. good luck