Hi there, was looking for a budget computer, so bought a second hand one online - it is six years old - i need it mainly to practice and apply coding and programming knowledge i am learning at university under my computer science course. So I bought this Acer Emachines EL 1600 because it was quite cheap. The seller did specify that he does not know how to reset the computer back to factory settings, so I though it surely wouldn't be that hard so I bought it thinking that resetting would be easy enough. Now the PC is terribly slow (really, really dead slow) and has many malware and trojans it seems, so I want to be able to reset it. But the issue is that I can't find a way to reset the PC.
OK, so the default e-machines files that should be installed by default on the PC seem to have been wiped out, since the original user seems to have installed another OS onto the PC, so i cannot use the Acer e-recovery tools that usually come installed with Acer PCs.
I contacted the seller again and he said that the PC came installed with windows XP and no recovery disks or any other disks as such were provided. I confirmed with electronic stores that Acer PCs dont usually come with a disk - here in NZ.
Upon start up, the Acer logo is accompanied with 2 options: Del to enter setup (CMOS utility) and F12 to open boot menu and NO OTHER keys or combinations of keys work - i.e. as suggested on many other forums and elsewhere on the internet, neither of F2 or Alt+F10 have any effect.
So ultimately, I don't see any way to reset the PC now. Although in some places I read that one could reset Acer PCs using the recovery partition called PQSERIVCE - which is present but is named unknown and cannot seem to be able to set it to be active and launch recovery? Can someone suggest if I can use that partition (maybe by making a bootable partition CD) to reset the computer back to its factory settings?
Here is a screenshot of the partitions visible to me on the PC - attached.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and thanks heaps in advance for any assistance!!
OK, so the default e-machines files that should be installed by default on the PC seem to have been wiped out, since the original user seems to have installed another OS onto the PC, so i cannot use the Acer e-recovery tools that usually come installed with Acer PCs.
I contacted the seller again and he said that the PC came installed with windows XP and no recovery disks or any other disks as such were provided. I confirmed with electronic stores that Acer PCs dont usually come with a disk - here in NZ.
Upon start up, the Acer logo is accompanied with 2 options: Del to enter setup (CMOS utility) and F12 to open boot menu and NO OTHER keys or combinations of keys work - i.e. as suggested on many other forums and elsewhere on the internet, neither of F2 or Alt+F10 have any effect.
So ultimately, I don't see any way to reset the PC now. Although in some places I read that one could reset Acer PCs using the recovery partition called PQSERIVCE - which is present but is named unknown and cannot seem to be able to set it to be active and launch recovery? Can someone suggest if I can use that partition (maybe by making a bootable partition CD) to reset the computer back to its factory settings?
Here is a screenshot of the partitions visible to me on the PC - attached.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and thanks heaps in advance for any assistance!!
