How to Restore a Dell Notebook Computer to the Factory Defaults

You can restore your Dell laptop to factory condition.

Dell notebooks, widely used by home users and businesses, can provide many years of trouble-free service. When something does go wrong, you can usually resolve the problems quite easily. There are times, however, when the best course of action is to restore the Dell laptop to its original factory defaults.

Things You'll Need

• External hard drive or thumb drive

Instructions

1. Back up all of your personal data to a thumb drive or external hard drive. The restoration of the Dell laptop to factory default settings will destroy all the data on the hard drive.

2. Shut the laptop down and restart it.

3. When the Dell screen appears, hold the "Ctrl" key down and press the "F11" key. Choose "Restore" from the menu.

4. Press "Confirm" at the warning screen. This screen warns you that all of your data will be erased.

5. Wait for the message that the restore process was successful and press "Finish." Press "Enter" to restart the computer.

References

• Dell Support: Using the Restore Partition