I hate to say this, but it IS really important that you have the restore or reinstallation disks. Many makers, Dell among them, do not include them with new PCs any more - and when you get a virus that eats your recovery partition, or your kid deletes it to make room for a new game, guess what? You’re up a tributary sans propulsive device.
That said, you can make them at home and don’t have to pay the service droid to make them.
“service droid”
Ouch, that hurt. You are one cold person.
It is a good idea to have the disks. That reminds me........
Or you can just re-install the OS and any apps you use from scratch, using the OS and software CD’s that SHOULD have come with your purchase.
I sometimes reccomend people do that anyway when purchasing a new computer. OEM’s tend to include alot of useless crap in thier installs.... stuff that you’ll never use, eats up resources and can be difficult to remove cleanly.
Just make sure you have a functional copy of the drivers for your Network card burned to a CD and you should be good to download any of the other drivers you might need from the manufacturer (free of charge). That way you’ll also be getting the latest patched drivers (ones that ship installed are often outdated by the time you bring a new system home).
It can take a few hours to get everything loaded up and ready to go though.