Last night I needed to wipe a machine of mine clean - back to factory settings. On the 6400 series there is a D partition that has all of the factory settings. It even has a little utility called "PCRestore.exe" that looks VERY promising.

However, if you double click it it will ask if you would like to reformat. Of course, you say "yes" and then it starts and then you get a brilliant dialog error.

I don't have a screen shot of it, but basically, its an error box that has the error icon (big red circle with an X in it) and an OK button. No error text. Click "OK" and the thing shuts down.

*Smacks forehead on table*

Crap. Great. What do I do now? This is not the most intuitive process in the world.

So how do you restore it back to factory defaults?

(This is mainly here for my own personal notes, but hopefully someone else finds this through the magic of the "internets").

If you look on the web you will find a ton of info instructing you to:

1. Reboot
2. When the "Dell" logo shows up on reboot while the BIOS is being read hit CTRL + F11 over and over and over.

Yeah. Sure. Didn't work. I tried it, literally 20 times. Maybe I'm an idiot, who knows ... but take it from me... on my PC it did not work.

The real way is to do the following (I could be a little off on this exact location of the settings, but you get the idea):

1. Start > Programs > Accessories
2. System Restore
3. Restore back to factory settings

Run that and like magic, it will reboot into the restore image and in about 10 minutes your computer will be back to factory default. Schweet.