How do i restore my Dell labtop to factory settings? I can with my HP no problem?

Dell laptops have a ghost partition embedded on the hard drive. I copied and pasted these instructions from the owners manual of my Dell Inspiron 1501, they should work on yours too!

Use Dell PC Restore by Symantec only as the last method to restore your operating system. PC Restore

restores your hard drive to the operating state it was in when you purchased the computer. Any programs

or files added since you received your computer—including data files—are permanently deleted from the

hard drive. Data files include documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, digital photos, music files, and

so on. If possible, back up all data before using PC Restore.

To use PC Restore:

1 Turn on the computer.

During the boot process, a blue bar with www.dell.com appears at the top of the screen.

2 Immediately upon seeing the blue bar, press <Ctrl><F11>.

If you do not press <Ctrl><F11> in time, let the computer finish starting, and then restart the

computer again.

NOTICE: If you do not want to proceed with PC Restore, click Reboot in the following step.

3 On the next screen that appears, click Restore.

4 On the next screen, click Confirm.

The restore process takes approximately 6–10 minutes to complete.

5 When prompted, click Finish to reboot the computer.

NOTE: Do not manually shut down the computer. Click Finish and let the computer completely reboot.

6 When prompted, click Yes.

The computer restarts. Because the computer is restored to its original operating state, the screens that

appear, such as the End User License Agreement, are the same ones that appeared the first time the

computer was turned on.

7 Click Next.

The System Restore screen appears and the computer restarts.

8 After the computer restarts, click OK.

9 You will now have to run Windows Update as well as Live Update for your virus protection because these will be seriously out of date.