Formatting a laptop?

[blueonblack]

My wife uses a Toshiba Satellite laptop, that came with Vista Home Premium 32-bit preinstalled. It's gotten really slow, the hard drive is full and cluttered, it's got adware and spyware on it, etc etc etc, and didn't come with a restore disc of any kind. I have an unregistered copy of the system builder's edition of Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Can I wipe the drive on her laptop and do a clean install of Vista from that disk, or are there likely to be Toshiba-specific drivers on her hard drive that aren't included with the bare Vista OS?

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get this clean install done would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

[Bopher]

Formatting and reinstalling shouldn't be a problem other then you'll need a different code for activation, wait you said system builder edition. Anyway I thought Vista pretty much can get generic drivers first then update after you get online. I installed 7 on my Dell and it works really good.

[Zephik]

Well, if you want to be super safe, I'd download the drivers now and save them to a thumb drive or something. Do the reinstall and there you go, you have all your drivers ready to go if you need them. Another method that I've done before is do the reinstall and if you cant connect to the internet via wireless then get out a Ethernet cable and that usually does the trick. Then install the drivers, etc. Although, I once couldn't even get the Ethernet port to work so I had to use a secondary PC to get the drivers.

You can get the drivers from their website, by the way. At least, with Dells you can. Pretty sure all products that require special drivers have them available on their website product page.

[SgtM]

There should be a recovery partition. You can probably get to it by pressing F2 or F10 on startup, after POST.

[farlo]

you can get an oem copy of vista, and it should work the the key on the sticker. ive got oem discs of xp and vista for reformat jobs. just get drivers from manufacturer sites and it sure be fine.

[HackSore]

If there is no recovery partition, it would be advisable to get all the drivers before the format, as they can sometimes be pretty hard to track down depending on the age of the machine.