I have been given the task of fixing my mum's computer, and this is probably going to involve reinstalling everything (again) only she has gone and lost the recovery disks I made up for her when she got it

Is there an easy way to do this? Is there something i can download to cater for this?

It will be great to get rid of all the acer crapware, and I am planning on replacing norton with MSE, even though there is still 6 months left on the subscription. (I told her not to renew it)



Any advice on how to go about this would be greatly appreciated.

You can download a completely legal Vist .iso from this site, install that and activate it with the product key from your COA sticker that is on the bottom of the laptop or the rear of the box. [Direct Download Links] Download Official Windows Vista RTM with SP1 Setup Files (32-bit and 64-bit) - Tweaking with Vishal

Great stuff. Sort of what I was expecting. I nearly did something similar on my new Vaio Win 7 machine earlier this year, but opted to just remove some of the crapware and use CCleaner and Puran Defrag to get it running.

So I take it I just go into dos and boot from the disc and it's pretty straightforward? I might want to do a zero on HD as well before or after.

Is this the most up to date version or will I have a million updates to install after?

Would you recommend using MSE with Vista? Can you get versions of CCleaner and Puran for Vista as well?

Can you perform a boot defrag with auslogic?

Great cheers, might just stick with that as it's what I use with win 7.

Wid ye credit it, my mum just told me she has finally found the lost disks. So now I am in a slight dilemma as to what to do. On the one hand I know what I am doing with the recovery disks so nothing should go wrong, apart from the fact that the disks are now 5 1/2 years old and could contain errors on them. I'm in favour of just doing a complete reinstall, but if it goes wrong then I'm not sure what to do.

Any advice?

Sounds like a good plan to me. It's time she just bought a new computer anyway, I keep telling her Windows 7 is way better. Cheers for the advice guys, will let you know how it goes.