Hi all I got a virus on my machine and the guy helping my said i would have to reformat windows to take care of it, but im not sure on how to do it, i have done a system restore but i dont think it the same thing its a dell e310 i dont have any windows disk if someone can help that would be great
Your Dell should have come with a bunch of discs, called recovery discs. These discs would have utilities, drivers and also the version of Windows that came on the PC when you bought it. If not i am sure Dell will sell you a set. But you really need those to format your hard drive because it is part of the Windows install process that does it. Now you can manually format the hard drive but without your discs you have nothing to put back on it as far as an operating system.
well, you can call Dell and see how much they will charge you for a new set. From what i heard Dell is pretty cheap for the OS CD. Just call them. It may only cost you about $10-15. Or buy a stand alone version of Windows which will cost a lot more. Like i said above, you can reformat all you want but you still need an OS to put back on there once you do. The very first thing i would try would be to get every free virus/adware tool i could get for free and run those to see if you can get rid of the problem. Some i have used are: Adaware SE Spybot Search & Destroy even a system restor to a point before you noticed you had a virus may do the trick. A clean reformat every so often is always a great thing for the performance of your system, even if it is a pain having to reinstall everything. Avast
