Solved windows setup.exe?

ok this might be a long shot but...
I am wonderinig if somewhere hidden in windows vista there is a setup file for the vista OS. back in the days of my win98 pc if It started to run slow or malfunction often, I would just run windows setup. I dont know where I found it but it was there on my hard drive back then. I have searched my vista pc but have not found it. I remember rerunning setup for windows 98 was a cure all. and made my pc fast as new again, It would even work with all my programs still installed. could I get it off a borrowed vista DVD? or is it somewhere on my harddrive?

I assume you mean system repair? , which is available via either booting with yuor Vista OS disk in your cd/dvd drive or if its a shop bought pc the files will
be stored on a separate partition on yuor hard drive , accessable via tapping a key (for example F9) during bootup , which will then take you to your recovery section where you can choose a "repair install"

If you had listed your system specs i could have told you how to do straight away!!

no I don't mean system repair, system restore or system recovery. what I am talking about is a setup.exe for the OS. as far as system specs it's an acer aspire 5520 with AMD x64duo running vista home premium 32bit er is it 34 bit. with 2 70gig hard drives. I don't have a boot disk( or install disk) and I have never backed up the system. I am unsure if there is a partition, but I think that would be visible in disk propertys, right?

ok, system specs updated!
so if the windows vista install disk is actually copyed to a partition on my hard drive, Can I reinstall vista from there. I would do sys recovery but that only allows me to go back one week and the problem I have is much older.the problem I have is that no downloads make it to the pc.

Hello Mtnbuilder,

Sorry, but the setup.exe file is not an option in Vista.

Since your computer is an OEM (Acer), then you may be able to restore Vista back to factory defaults.

From Q7 at Acer:
Step 1: Back up your data before proceeding.
Step 2: Reboot the system and press ALT-F10 repeatedly during the POST to start Acer eRecovery Management and reinstall Vista.
Step 3: Select Restore system to factory default.
Step 4: The wizard will lead you through formatting the C: drive and installing Vista from the recovery partition on your hard drive.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

wow thanks a bunch! I'll try that.

You're welcome. Please let us know how it went for you.

well it worked fine less painless than anticipated. 45 windows updates later I'm back online. I have a couple questions though.
1. how much hd space should vista 32 use?
when the reinstall was finished It was using 11.8gigs, after all the updates it's up to 17.4gigs thats including java and Ie8 plus an adobe update oh and avg8.5.
2. how much space does system restore use?

well thanks again! now I'm off to the tutorials to do some tweeking. It seems a little slower now. the nice thing about the restore was that I put all my pics and music on the d: drive and it is still there. I had back ups so I wasn't worried.

oh! one last final more important thing...
I had checked the system specs yesterday and it said I had a full 1 gig of ram but now the specs say 786mb. so do I have a bad chip or something? I dont know to much about hardware. is there something that parked itself in the ram and was not removed?

I'm happy to hear that you back up and running.

It appears that you may have a integrated graphics chip that has part of your RAM dedicated for it. You will usually have an option in the BIOS for adjusting the amount of RAM to be used for graphics. I would not recommend going any lower though, or you could have some serious video quality degradation.

That sounds about right for how much space was used by Vista. By default Vista allocates 15% of your selected hard drive volume towards storing System Restore points after installation.

shawn,
thanks so much for all your help! my laptop is better than new now. your tutorials are well written and so helpful. I did about 90% of the tweeks to speed up vista and it is so fast now. web surfiing is way better,as well as boot times. Next I'll see how it handles Real Flight G4.5 simulator.

You're most welcome.