i just ordered myself an external hard drive. what i want to do is backup my laptop to the external hard drive and then reboot it to factory. the laptop originally came with windows XP and i upgraded it to window Vista. When i reboot back to factory settings do i go back to Xp or can i still keep Vista. how do i reboot my laptop, i have a toshiba.

 

Depends on what kind of "backup" you want. Using Norton Ghost or another similar program, you can create an exact duplicate of a drive, exact to the point that you could put the hard drive and its clone in two different computers and both would boot the same thing. Or you can just go through every folder and copy all of your files over to the external drive once you get it.

Then you will need to reformat the laptop hard drive. You can do a regular format or a low level format. I highly recommend the low level format if you have had the laptop for awhile.

The low level one requires a special program. Find out what brand hard drive the laptop one is and go to that brand's website. Download their hard drive tools. Within that program, you'll find the low level format or "zero fill" option. This will repair any damaged sectors you might have. A regular format will not do this. If it's a newer laptop and you wanna skip that, its cool too.

Now... Personally, I would go back to XP or switch to linux. Vista is buggy and awful.

I've never installed Vista, but XP has an option for you to select which "partition" to install windows on. What I do is choose to delete all partitions and then create a new partition. Then I format that new partition in NTFS (not the quick one.) This sounds really complicated, but it's all right there on the screen.

Now, I don't know about Toshibas, but some brands have "recovery partitions" that show up as another hard drive, ie: D: Recovery in My Computer. The setup is in that area. If your Toshiba came with "recovery CDs", that's the way you go. You use the CD that says Operating System or "Recovery Disc".

The Recovery ones are the easiest for basic computer users. It does it all for you. Advanced users prefer to set everything up manually.