Oh Dell, you Devil!

For a the past week my friend has been IM'ing me about how to help out a mutual friends' Virus-Trojan-maybe even Herpes ridden computer. I told them to try all the Anti-spy programs and Anti-Virus I could think of, and non seemed to work, or they would just freeze up.

Anyways they had backed up all their important files, and was ready for the famous computer saying, "Format and Re-Install".  But we could not find the restore CD. After a long call to India, er Tech Support we learned that there is no CD unless you pay for one, "Software Warranty" but there is a hidden partition with a ghost image of the original configuration. Support told us they could not tell us anymore without charging us for the call, but let us know one thing "CTRL F11". 

It was my assumption that we were to push this combo when the computer starts up and we would be golden. But after 3 tries of hitting the keys and nothing happening, we had to go back to searching the support forums. Finally we found a post that said you should push the combo when you see the standard F2 for setup appear on the screen. Well that's what we did!

OK not we needed to focus on a different problem. We had also noticed that when the computer boots up it gets a "keyboard not detected" error. This was odd as they keyboard works once windows loads. We tried to use a different PS2 keyboard, but guess what, yep this computer doesn't have any of those old school ports on it, only about 6 usb ports are on the back. So once again searching on the forums I found a vague comment that said, Usually during boot up ONLY ONE USB port is active. OH really! So after 4 reboots trying different ports we found the magic one, you can tell because the led was lit up during the whole bios booting part. For us it was the usb port closest to the Ethernet jack, why or why don't they color label it Keyboard, is beyond me. Anyways once we got that figured out the CTRL F11 worked like a charm.

So anyways what should have taken like 30mins took about 2.5 hours, I figured I would right this in case someone is searching the net with the same problem maybe they would find some help because Dell sure didn't give much.