reformatting dell inspiron 1505E

I am in the process of reformatting someones laptop. I am putting Windows XP professional in it but when it boots up it shows 2 options…..Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home. Any idea how I can wipe it clean to install just professional XP back in the laptop. We had to do this because of someone else using the laptop and them playing stupid games on FB…the games simply notgood the laptop up.

Hi meme3160! To answer your question, you need to edit your boot.ini file to remove the entry you don't want. You can do that by going into control panel -> system -> advanced -> startup and recovery -> under the "system startup" section click EDIT to edit the system startup options manually. The boot.ini file will open in Notepad, find the XP home entry and remove it. Save your changes. Now, to address another issue. I work in the computer business and so I see this all the time so I must say something about. The laptop obviously came with a valid, legitimate version of Windows XP home edition installed. It has a valid certificate of authenticity with a genuine product key on the bottom of the computer. Its likely, although I am not accusing you of anything, that you are attempting to install a VLK (bootlegged) version of Windows XP professional. You should not be doing this when there is a perfectly legitimate product key on the bottom of the computer so your friend's computer will pass future genuine tests and continue to receive support from Microsoft. The only thing you need is a Windows XP home OEM installation disc or the laptop's own recovery discs or recovery partition built into the laptop. The choice is yours, but if this is not a genuine copy of XP Professional you are installing, you are doing your friend more harm than good and destroying a perfectly good product that it was meant to come with. I certainly hope you will be explaining this to him/her if this is the case. Too many people bring their computers into my shop to be worked on and I have to reformat their hard drives because a friend who wanted to help re-formatted their hard drive and installed a bootlegged version of XP pro on it. Its simply not the friendly thing to do. Ok, enough said. Again, I don't know the background of the product you are installing so I am just making this point for any future readers that may do what I just described. Eventually it will bite the user, and for no valid reason should that ever happen.

I will try and do what you suggested tomorrow. To answer your question about the Windows XP Professional software…..This software was sent to us directly from Dell. We sent a request to them to get the software because they never sent it to the owner when it was purchased. We originally tried to do a system restore to the state it was in when purchased but it wouldn't work. We were told to reformat and in order to do it we needed the software for his laptop. With that we were directed to request the software from Dell. Dell doesn't send the software to just anyone. They have record of his service tag etc for his laptop and knew what software his laptop needed. Hopefully itn will all work out and everything will install properly. If I need more help somewhere I will post some more. Thanks for your help and concern. -Cheers..

Thats good to know Meme.. Take a look on the bottom of the laptop and see what license it has. If it is for XP home, or XP pro. They should've sent the same disc for what was already on the laptop. But, who knows. As long as it is a valid recovery disc for that computer you should be fine. There is a possibility they sent the wrong disc. I'm glad that its not illegitimate.

It was Windows XP Pro. Well the laptop is all up and running smoothly. Now all he has to do is keep his older brother out of the websites he doesn't need to be in. Thanks for your help.