making the old into new

[sunnyc]

So I bought an hp pc about a year ago, and i was stupid and didn't do any backing up or use any virus protection so it crashed...and of course hp's don't come with windows discs to reformat so i had to use an old dell windows disc...i know bad idea. i tried downloading drivers and what not but none of them worked, so i thought i would just rebuild the pc, but my question is what are things that i can salvage and what should i do?
and another thing, before my comp was formatted, it had media center on it, but i don't really want it back, so how do i get rid of all the components or whatever they are called that are in the computer?

[rjfvillarosa]

To be honest you could just buy a new copy of Windows, format the harddrive (zero fill so as to get rid of all the patitions including the HP recovery partition), install the new copy of Windows and update all your drivers via the HP site.
But. you should also be able to get information from the HP site that will allow you to reinstall your existing copy of Windows via the recovery partition.
What exact model of HP computer is it?

[sunnyc]

well, i just wanted some new stuff on my computer anyway, and i wanted to take out all the media center stuff, and so i was wondering how i would do that...it's an hp media center pc m7060n...and i kinda wanted to buy vista, but i wanted to wait a little bit, so i was trying to gather information about rebuilding it before i installed vista, and i can't get the drivers to work, ive already tried downloading them and they wouldn't work...i don't know what to do

[glc]

If you did not make the recovery disks and your recovery partition is gone or does not work, contact HP and buy a set.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...cname=bph07145