OT - anyone any good with computers?

[dennis]

Its a function of the OEM not windows. they either have to supply disks or a program, some supply both.

[dennis]

Its vista as the OP stated.

[Terry Casey]

I have an Acer desktop (running XP). It was delivered with a blank writeable DVD.

On initial startup, it automatically installed Windows from an image on the HDD, then prompted for a blank DVD to create a recovery disk.

I recently trashed it, installed 2GB of RAM (instead of 512kB) and a 1GB HDD (I think the original was 80GB, pre-formatted as C and D (intended only for use as a backup drive) plus the origal boot partition.

The recovery disk worked fine.

[george [dicegeorge]]

Take out the hard drive and fit it in an external case with a usb connection (£10ish) (The more you fiddle with it the more data you will lose)

put a new (BIG) hard drive into the computer and install ubuntu 10.04 on it, or windows xp, or vista, or windows 7 if you must have windows.

Then try and copy data from your old hard drive in its usb caddy into the new hard drive.

good luck.

[John Rumm]

I must be a Luddite then...

I always opt for it for my main email account on the grounds that I can access email any time even without internet connectivity. I can personally make sure its backed up, and am not relying on an ISP to not accidentally delete it. I can also do complicated searches on various mailboxes quickly and easily since the information is available locally with fast access.

[Andy Champ]

Not Vista. XP or 7 fine, but not Vista.

Andy

[Tim Watts]

Would have thought you'd run your own mail server John :)

[Man at B&Q]

I do the same with IMAP. I copy everything I want to keep to local folders, apart from a few "pending" in the inbox.

MBQ

[blackhead]

I'ts possible that your PC wasn't shut down correcly before and the hard disk is corrupted. So you need to be able to run Chkdsk /r from the command console.

Do you have the Vista installation CD?

[John Rumm]

Yup, they vary greatly in how "severe" they are as well. Some are basically like the OEM version of windows with perhaps an extra check at installation to check for a particular vendor's name in the bios. To the scorched earth policy ones that wipe, reformat, and reinstall everything from scratch. The former will let you do stuff like a reinstall of windows in place without destroying your data and retaining any installed applications.