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My laptop is not well, physically it's fine but mentally it's gone. It's got really slow it says the disk is full but I don't know what kind of shite it has on it If I put the restore disks in will that wipe everything back t factory settings and make it faster again. Also can I copy the complete drive in a oner onto an external drive before doing this so I can copy things back over after restore.
Yes yes & yes. Buy an external drive and copy all your data onto there. Export all your bookmarks & everything else you want to keep & copy those across to the drive too. Put the windows disc in & reboot the machine, it should boot to the disc, select format and wipe the machine. It will take about half a day & your machine will run like new, do it once a year!
Nah do it the other way round!
Buy a new internal hard drive and an external caddy for your old one, put new drive into laptop reinstall windows and enjoy a new pc put the old one into the caddy to get access to any data you need once you have copied all the stuff you wanna keep back to the lappy you can wipe it and use as a backup drive...
No point getting a new drive to sit outside you laptop which is obviously suffering from degradation...
It will take about half a day
I've never known it take that long
I'd probably use that manufacturers recovery disc or partition rather a Windows disc
What Tom said, that sounds like a better idea if you're confident replacing your hard drive. I would say about half a day to install windows all the security updates and then all the other software you might like.
If you have a lot of data ( where: a lot = more than the size of the current disk ) then buying a new disk is a good idea.
Otherwise, you can do the following:
1. Un-install any software you no longer need.
2. Download CCleaner, let it do it's stuff, clean out the registry, and reduce the number of programs that auto-start "useful" applications.
3. Defragment your hard drive
4. Do points 1 - 3 on a regular basis.
That'll cost you precisely nothing* and should if you are lucky get you to pretty much the same place as you would be with a clean install.
* unless you decide to email me a pint for helping you
clean out the registry
Your registry isn't dirty. Leave it alone.