[barbs]

My Dad recently got malware on his Windows desktop computer, and wanted me to fix it for him. He's reasonably tech-savvy but malware can happen to the best of us. I tried searching and removing suspicious looking files, but it kept coming back, so I decided to reformat the computer and reinstall windows.

The first part was to get an image to install from. Windows offers .iso downloads on their website[0], but you need to enter the product key for the computer to access it. I used a third-party tool to dig this out of the registry, but attempting to use this key on the website gave a non-descript error-code. After googling around, I found that it wasn't giving me the download because it was an OEM-license (or something), since it came installed on the DELL computer.

Luckily my Dad had kept the disc that came with the computer, and I used this to reinstall windows. However, like the OP, I was missing drivers for a handful of things, including the built-in wireless and wired network adapters. Luckily, before reinstalling I'd found a folder on the C drive called "Drivers" which looked important, and had backed this onto a USB drive.

The point is, the whole process took much longer than expected due it being...Windows. The DRM and driver issues would likely be totally absent if I were installing linux. And the whole reason I was doing this in the first place was to remove adware, which is barely ever if at all a problem on linux!

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-recovery

[ygra]

The easist way to get rid of adware I tend to use on other's PCs is to just use System Restore. Most adware won't break in there so it just takes a few minutes to be reasonably sure that the system is clean again (at the expense of the last thing they installed, of course).

As for getting a clean slate back, Windows 8 has a Reset function that restores the system to a fresh install state while keeping data intact. Also much easier than hunting for a recovery DVD or an ISO.