Hello, from a newbie

[the-peoples-poet]

And I am in need of some help. If possible. I came across this forum by Googling for details of downloads for a Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop. To save me typing out everything again, I will copy-and-paste a question I posted on Yahoo Questions. I am not sure if I have joined the right forum to get help, but I am at my wits end with things, any help and advice will be appreciated so very much thank you.

Here is what I posted on Yahoo Questions;

Recently I had some trouble with my computer. All of a sudden the DVD RW drive stopped recognising any discs of any type, it still won't recognise any despite me reinstalling the firmware. I tried to do a System Restore and when the computer had gone through it's process, the message that popped up on the screen said System Restore Did Not Complete.

So I tried to do a factory reset, but that didn't work either. It got to a certain point in the restore process and then stopped, a window appeared with a red circle and a white X in it and and OK button and it wouldn't complete the process.

Then, after that, stupidly, I somehow managed to reformat my RECOVERY D drive, and everything got wiped from it. So I used a piece of software to try to undo what I did and it appeared to work, so I recovered the files, placed them back into the Recovery drive and tried the process again. The files must not have recovered properly because none of them work at all now.

I thought that reinstalling Vista from the disc I was given with my computer, and the reinstallation of Vista went through fine, I also had to reinstall all the drivers from the other disc and they installed fine too. Thing is, the RECOVERY D drive still doesn't work, it didn't restore.

The computer is not running like it did before, none of the graphics are the same, none of the Windows themes look the same as they did before. The section of the Control Panel that is called Performance And Information Tools, that has the performance details in it, now has a low 1.0 performance rating and there is an exclamation mark beside a sentence that says New Hardware Detected and that is asking me to refresh. I did this earlier, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

Is there any way I can get all the files back properly, by redownloading them from somewhere maybe, or by doing something else so that I can get my Factory Reset procedure back? I feel, though I may be wrong, that if I had this procedure back, it may help things.

I am quite comp savvy, but this last problem had me stumped, as does the issues I have now, hence why I am asking for advice and help from other like-minded people.

My computer is a Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop running on Windows Vista Home Basic.

Thank you.