Whether you are planning to give away, sell, or restore your laptop to an out-of-box state, a factory reset is the solution. Performing a factory reset not only improves system performance but also gets rid of any bugs or issues with the operating system.
Depending on your requirement, there are several ways to perform a factory reset on your HP laptop.
But before you start, here are a few things you should consider.
Via Windows Settings
The simple way to reset your HP laptop is throughWindows settings. It provides an option to reset Windows and all its settings with just a few steps using the reset option. However, this method will only work if you have a healthy recovery partition on your drive.
Here’re the steps.
Through HP Cloud Recovery
HP Cloud Recovery tool allows you to factory reset your laptop to its original state. The tool will also provide pre-installed OEM software.
However, not all HP laptop supports it. So you can check theHP cloud recovery supported platformwebsite to see if your laptop supports HP cloud recovery.
Before we begin the HP Cloud Recovery process, here are some things to keep in mind.
Creating a Bootable USB with HP Cloud Recovery Tool
Here’s how you can create a bootable USB drive with the HP cloud recovery tool.
Change Boot Order
Once you have successfully created an HP system recovery bootable USB drive, you need tochange the laptop’s boot order. This allows the system to prioritize the USB drive over the storage device containing the OS.
Also, make sure that you remove all the peripheral devices except the bootable USB drive.
To change the boot order on HP laptops,
Performing HP System Recovery
Now that you have changed the boot order, the system will now use the bootable USB drive to boot.
Via Recovery Environment
You cannot access Windows Settings if the system fails to boot into OS or gets stuck in a boot loop. In such situations, you can factory reset the laptopusing the Windows recovery environment.
Things To Do After Factory Reset
When you reset the PC, any drivers that you have previously installed will also be removed. Windows will only use its default set of drivers, but these drivers may be outdated. So if you are going to use the laptop after the reset, I recommend that youupdate Windowsand the drivers.
If you haveAMDorNVIDIAGPUs, you will need to install their graphics driver from their respective websites.
If you have previously backed up your data, restore all the backed-up data and files.
Finally, reinstall the necessary apps and software, and customize Windows settings as per your needs.
