[dennisw]

I understand all that. If you use the recovery partition and the process poops out in the middle you are screwed. So better to back up the recovery partition via DVD or thumb drive before using the recovery partition

I will find out tomorrow if the laptop came with restore DVDs or the user is supposed to make his own DVDs or thumb drive backup.

[Abby4116]

I just finished doing that with a windows 7 Toshiba laptop and I am so thankful that I did make the DVDs. Very few laptops came with restore disks - they used the partition/make your own. Hard drives in laptops don't always last forever.

Only strange thing I ran into - it set the date back to 2009 so every website showed bad certificate warning.