The problem will be that if you do a factory restore it will return everything to the original condition that was there when you first fired it up. The operative word here is EVERYTHING. Including that antiviriwhatever that HP loaded on there to start with.
That said, since it is an HP, probably buried in some menu that starts with ‘HP’ is the restore stuff. (I don’t have an intact HP in original configuration or I could tell you where they hide it.) Maybe HP has a ‘help’ thingie that may have the answer and tell you how to do it. It will nag you constantly about ‘if you do this you’ll lose everything’ but it will get you back to the beginning.
I have an intact Acer (meaning I haven’t finished playing with it yet so all the factory stuff is there still) and they hide the recovery thing in a folder called ‘Acer’ and then under ‘Acer Recovery Management’ and then under ‘Recovery option’, and then restore factory settings... In other words they make it so you cannot do it accidentally because you need to click through so many steps.
Look for folders that are labeled with HP’s name and see if any one of then has the recovery thingie in it. And as I said, if they have a ‘help’ function try searching that for ‘recovery’ or ‘restore’..
And then after you do restore it, you will need to figure out how to get their viral unsolution off of it again..
It was Aaron’s anti-virus virus that gave you trouble, right? HP gives you McAfee or Norton or something that’s easy to remove.
Aaron’s gave me the CD with the anti-virus and I installed it, but as soon as I realized it wouldn’t let me get to my banking sites, I tried to uninstall it and that’s when the fun began.
If I lose everything, that’s fine, as I can reinstall it all. Right now, I’m using Avast, Ad-aware and Ghostery and they seem to be doing a good job with the tracking cookies and other nasty things.
Lacking a further solution, I will go through the steps you listed and see what’s there.
“... since it is an HP, probably buried in some menu that starts with ‘HP’ is the restore stuff.”
I’ve got an old HP Media Center PC; all the restore data is in a locked D:\ partition on the main hard drive. There’s probably an HP Help menu that tells how to get it to realign the C:\ volume content with the safe-and-secure D:\ volume image.
I’ll nose around a bit later, and re-post.