help with a dell vostro 1000

ok well my friend gave me his laptop so i could reinstall the OS and make it run faster. the problem is is that he doesnt have the recovery cd that came with the computer.

for some reason it has vista basic with less than 480 mb of ram and 1.80GHz amd processor, way too slow for vista.

someone at school told me that i cant install an OS on a dell laptop unless its the recovery cd that came with the laptop. i was going to put the windows 7 beta OS on it because its supposed to run better. id also dualboot with vista basic.

so is there a way i can get a recovery cd for this computer like a recovery disc creator or something?

thanks

 

You can use any Vista Basic CD to load the OS on your Dell; you can activate your installation using the key on the bottom of the machine (assuming it shipped with Vista Basic). You may need to call MS to complete the activation. The benefit of using the Dell OEM CD is that you don't need to activate the installation.

There is no method by which Dell allows you to make a conventional recovery CD as Dell typically ships all its machines with an OEM installation disk. If you no longer have the disk or another OEM or retail Vista Basic disk, you can call up Dell and they should give you one (possibly at a small cost).

Finally, if you're still using the factory install, there should be a recovery partition that you can use to restore the machine to its factory settings. Not as good as a clean install, and it doesn't let you dual boot, but it's an option if you want to go down that path.