Reinstalling Vista without a CD/DVD how?

[vitriol]

Hello all,

Firstly I do not need to reinstall my laptops o/s but I am curious as to how I might go about it.  The Vista Home Premium came preinstalled on the laptops hard disk so therefore I have no CD/DVD with it on.  I have done the backup as suggested by the built in Samsung software and it has created 5 4GB files and 1 file of 1kb in size.

Should I go to the place I bought the laptop and ask them why I don't have a product CD/DVD?  Or am I missing something?

[Sebby]

The backup that you refer to was probably the creation of restore discs. See if you can boot from them. If not, try and acquire (i.e. borrow) a Vista disc off someone, as you can install it using the key from the bottom of your laptop, and that's perfectly legal.

[zappaDPJ]

It's common practice for many laptop manufacturers not to provide a disk based backup as the expect you to burn your own restore disk from a built in procedure. I would recommend that you do just that as the restore disk created is likely to be tailored to suit your laptop so if you do get a total loss on the hard drive you have a relatively pain free method of recovery which a standard MS OS disk may not give you.

[Sebby]

That's true, though you can always get drivers from the manufacturer's website - that's if Vista doesn't install them for you, which it probably will. Personally, I'd go down the clean install from a Vista disc route, as it excludes all the junk that laptop manufacturers bundle.

[vitriol]

Ok thanks all,

Guess I better burn those files to DVD's then.