TIPS & TRICKS: Restoring a Dell Machine Without Media

I've learned that Dell machines that have been (and all future ones, of course) shipped after July 2004 now have a hidden partition that contains an image of the factory restore. This means that if you need to do a restore of the machine to the original factory state, then you can do that with the BIOS command of CTRL-F11. This is, of course, assuming that your factory hard drive hasn't been reconfigured or reformatted to your own specs. NOTE: This will wipe your computer of all data, so make sure you have a backup of your important data.