I got a new desktop computer recently. It’s very cool. It’s so fast I can post this tonight and not even worry about having the idea until a week from Thursday. Anyhoo, once I got my many gigs of goodies safely ensconced on the new machine, it seemed like a good time to reformat my HP dv5000 series laptop, the machine I’m using at this moment. Just wipe the hard drive clean and start over. It’s 3 years old and getting a little gummy and wobbly.

Don’t worry, this has a happy ending. The laptop is all restored, good as new, and running fine. We writers gotta keep our tools in working order, right?

In the good old days, a few years ago, a person who wanted to restore his computer used a disk that came with the machine. You bought the expensive thing, and it came with a genuine Windows disk, with a certificate of sanctity signed by Bill Gates. But computer makers are going cheapass on us, kids. My laptop gave me the option of creating my own restore disks when I first turned it on in 2006. Wow.

On the hard drive, there is also a partition – a special section, set apart from the rest of the computer’s contents – which can be activated to restore Windows XP on the computer. But here’s the problem:

There’s no instruction anywhere on the computer, or anywhere on the HP Web site, or really anywhere on any site on the Internet that a person can trust, that tells us how to use that partition. I even downloaded the technical manual for the laptop from HP, and it’s not mentioned. It has complete diagrams for reducing the beast to a pile of plastic and screws and putting it back together, but no restoration.

So today I put in the disk (there are two DVDs) and started the reformat. It warned me that I was erasing the hard drive, but I forged ahead. Then it told me what you – if you have found this post looking for the information – need to know:

It said this restore is going to make a partition on your hard drive for restoration of your computer to factory condition. If you ever need to use it, press F11 while booting up.

It told me this after the disk had started erasing my hard drive. Too late to go back and use that option. Then the disks took well over an hour – around 90 minutes – to do the job. With the set up business afterwards, it was close to 2 hours.

Sunuffabish. I have to believe that was not the fast way to do it. In fact, I’ve reformatted 2 other computers in the last week for other people – also Windows XP – and it took more like 30 or 45 minutes.

So here’s the poop:

To restore an HP (Hewlett-Packard) dv5000 series laptop (notebook) using the restore partition on the hard drive, press F11 during start-up. … Probably … that’s what it said to do.

Now, the information is googleable on the Internet, permanently. At least, that’s the premise of a blog post. It has a permanlink. (On a blogger blog like this one, the link is the time, at the end of the post, and it’s also the title of the post.) You’re welcome.

Oh, and by the way, my new computer is also an HP, with Windows Vista. It came with no disks at all. Just the partition on the hard drive. Which does not make me feel very secure.