I want to restore my laptop dell 1501 inspiron it has vista home basic back to factory setting i have tried the f8 and the ctrl +f11 and they dont work can you help i dont have a restore disc

Try this: Turn your computer on. As soon as you see the Dell logo appear on the screen, press and hold "CTRL" and "F11." This starts the Dell PC Restore by Symantec application.

No laptop is trashed when a password is lost. It just takes a little time to find out how to get into the system. I'll assume it is running XP Home that was originally installed on it from the specs I saw when researching. I'll also assume the password is not the one necessary to get into the BIOS CMOS setup- that one can normally be cleared by removing the CMOS battery and letting it set for a few hours or longer so the information is lost. The OS password can be cleared by making a bootable disk for that purpose. I have a Unix CD program that I made from information I downloaded from the Internet. You can do the same if you have access to a CD burner on another computer, say a friend's or one at work. I can get you the program's name if that's the route you want to take.

if you are running XP it's Ctrl + F11 on start up.

if it's Vista onwards try tapping F8 on start up to give recovery options

if the original hard drive of the laptop has never been replaced or reformatted since getting it, you may be able to use the recovery partition.

If you have XP, try to restat the laptop and while it restarts, press and hold down the CTRL key and keep tapping the F11 key as soon as it shows the Dell logo. See if this takes you to a recovery process.

If that does not work and you have Vista or Win 7, try to restart the computer and keep pressing F8 until it takes you to the Advanced Options section of Windows. You can then select to Repair your computer, log in as Administrator when prompted, then you can select the option to factory restore your computer.

Hope this works for you.

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=DSN_336966&isLegacy=true
I hope this helps.

Hi,

In order to reset your computer to Factory default settings without the disc, you can follow the instructions below.

1. Turn on your computer. Once you see the DeLL Logo Press and Hold the CTRL button then while holding CTRL button, press F11
2. You should see the Dell PC Restore by Symantec application.
3. You can click Restore and Confirm the restoration.
4. It will take 10-15 minutes. Once your computer rebooted, it should already be in the default settings

don't hit ctrl f11 instead hit F8 and then go into Dell Factory Image Restore, that will wipe, format and reinstall all the factory software that's stored on the Recovery Drive.

or reformat your laptop using your cd

Put recovery disk in the CD drive. On reboot, hold down F12 key. You should get a choice of drives to boot from. Make sure the first two are in the correct order:

1. CD-ROM (optical drive)
2. HDD (hard drive)

then press F10 to save and exit.

Now the laptop should boot correctly from the recovery disk.

If you have Windows Vista you can press F8 while booting to access the Windows Startup Repair and then select the Factory Image Restor.