How do I restore a PC back to its factory settings?

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!!

 

above from here

hope this helps, otherwise, you will have to find someone with a recovery cd from emachines for xp or a genuine windows xp install cd.

 

Hi, thanks for replying, as shown in the screenshot, when i right click on the partition, it does not show of the option of making it active, I saw a suggestion a while ago about turning that partition into a bootable partition in a cd or usb and booting that using some "magic tool" website or something rather, but I'm not sure how to do that...

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/241363-44-trying-pqservice-drive-screen

read the above thread , has instructions for using diskpart, which is described in the following 2 sites, (diskpart is part of xp)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx

https://www.microsoft.com/resources.../xp/all/proddocs/en-us/diskpart.mspx?mfr=true

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http://gparted.org/

the thread above also says to use gparted, (one of the tools on hirens, but can be downloaded separately). So here is the link to gparted download

 

If it is a PC, and you feel competent to do this, simply remove the battery for a few minutes, re-start your 'puter to see if it works, and if so, shut down the power to the machine, re-insert the battery, and the BIOS/CMOS should be reset to factory defaults. Worth a try.....

 

That won't do anything for the viruses and other crap on the hard drive.