Your comp should have it stored already in the system. Just last week I had to reinstall mine to. But the Hard disk I didn't have or need. It's already stored on the hard drive. Now I have an HP bought directly from HP not online or anywhere else. Whether that makes a difference I don't know. But even if your using the hard disk to reinstall that should be just like brand new. Now you might lose other programs, because that hard disk you have is just for windows. So all the programs that come on that hard disk might be a little different from say, games and other incidentals and even may get lost.....
Once you download the disk you should never need it again to start up, until and if you ever crash the system.
As your system is starting up and while it's still on the black screen, press & hold the "Esc" key, It should put you on the Startup screen. You go to Start Up. If that window opens up, go to reinstall windows or start up, I forgot what it said. Follow the prompts, and it'll take about an hour, depending how much space it has to clean off of the hard drive from your previous saved issues. Now there's about four or five other things on there, don't go to them because you'll be sitting wasting time on tests you don't need to do. everything will be reset to brand new. You'll have to change everything back to the way you had it. But once thats done, your system is wiped clean and brand new again...Everything runs smooth as silk....Let me know how that works. It took me hours an hours before I got help from a Tech. Everyone kept telling me you need the disk and I didn't. But thats because HP puts a permanet copy on the hard drive.
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