Hi Gang,

I just bought a 3 month old laptop from a friend of mine. It's a compaq presario with windows vista professional op-system. Apparently they don't use startup discs anymore. How do I restore this machine back to "out of the box" condition. Is it possible to do with out discs. I gotr the other guys name out of the user list, but his name and his computer mechanics name is all over the place, such as task manager. how do I get all his junk out of there?? I'm giving this to my daughter and don't want her to see things he was looking at either. I appriciate your help! Thanks

Generally when you first boot it'll show an option for System Recovery (it's either F10 or F11 if I recall correctly).

Can you go into the All Programs menu and find something like Compaq, Compaq Maintenance, or Compaq Recovery - there should be options in there to make recovery disks (if they haven't been made already) or there should be an option to recover the system to factory default.

Thanks folks, Finally got thru to the people at Compaq again and this time they said they would overnight me a set of start-up discs, and they did! Don't know why they wouldn't do that in the first place. USASMA, Thank you for your help. It's nice to know help is out there.

Bryan