I got a Vista recovery partition, any idea what I do with it?

Or should I just reformat the whole thing and stick xp on it?

Hi I would reformat and put XP on-heard so many bad things about Vista.

Hope that helps.

Or give 7 a go, better than Vista..

I used XP at work - no problems. I have a laptop (on loan from the company) that has Vista, and I've hated that OS from the time I started to use it up till now. Now at work I use Windows 7, and I must say that I'm reasonably impressed.

If I could be bothered I'd pay money to upgrade the lappie to Win 7 - but it's not my machine yet, so sod it! When it is mine I'll probably put some version of Linux on it.

You usually need a recovery disc to access the recovery partition - which you need to have made before your system goes on the blink.

Be wary of installing WinXP - I tried it on a laptop but it doesn't have the drivers for many of the bits of hardware in the laptop which the newer OSs will do natively so you need to search for XP drivers for your particular items of hardware - difficult to do online if you need a driver for the modem or networking function in the first place!

I'd re-install vista or go for Win 7.

(Actually I'd get a mac)

If I need a recover disc I'm going to tear HP a new one, I just want it to respond to something in under 2 minutes.

You think I'm kidding it's taken me nearly 10 mins to type this

ETA: Scratch that, thanks for the replies but the disk has started the dreaded tick of death. Lucky I backed everything up and now I have a call to Curry's "Whatever happens" insurance

Hope I get a new one the battery's cream-crackered too

[Edited on 7/7/10 by Ninehigh]