Dell: Hero and Villain.

[Siphorous]

It's now 4.15am and after much restoration, laptop back with Windows 7.

I have no idea what caused it but all 32 bit stuff... stopped. Only 64 bit stuff worked. e.g. IE 64 bit, Lightroom and not much else. All else failed with an 'application unable to start correctly' error.

System Restore was dead, even in safe mode as were quite a few things in Windows. I'm surprised it booted.

Why Dell the hero? Recovery options from the Window CD included 'restore system drive to Dell factory settings'. This worked, it was like I'd just got the laptop again with 'preparing for first use'. They include a hidden recovery partition on the drive.

Why Dell the villain? System Restore was on - but I hadn't checked when I first got the lappy... and it was using 0 space.

This time, I made sure System Restore was using some space...

*breathes sigh of relief*
*sleeps*

 

[itsmeJonB]

HP has system restore on the HDD on a tiny partition
suck on that Dell

 

[Siphorous]

Heh, the system restore being on but using 0% was silly. I would have changed it had I noticed but everything that said it was 'creating a restore point' that I installed didn't moan - so I assumed all was well.

Dell's restore to factory default was good though. All the drivers and stuff were already on so saved a lot of time.

Just restoring my old PS3 backup now to my new PS3.. (old one had to be returned twice, they gave up, gave me a voucher towards a new one).