You've still only got one hard drive but its partitioned. The recovery drive is a last resort recovery. You can take everything back to its 'out of the box' state by using this facility. Basically when you turn it on you can set this away by pressing F10 or F12. It will then format your main hard drive (usually C:) then reinstall windows and anything else that is pre loaded.

Be careful, it will erase everything so make sure you have everything backed up before using it.

By the way, eventually your computer will get loaded up with crap and bad registry entries. When it reaches this state taking it back to the bare bones can sort this out completely.

Just remember what I said about erasing data and files.

Personally I always have at least two partitions; one (C:) for the system files - windows etc - and a data drive (D) all files are saved to the data drive. All things like 'my documents' are re-sited to the D drive. This means that nothing is saved to the system drive and if I have a terminal windows problem I can just use system recovery to sort it out.

It will be easy, it will also install all the drivers automatically. Basically it will be set up the same way as when you first bought/nicked it.

or you could get a registry scanner or a tool like system mechanic to fix all your problems and get the computer up and running to its original state, system mechanic is a very good program

You could. But you'd be wasting your money. Yes it get cluttered but its not the big problem.

Just to elaborate; I've thought for some time that registry cleaners were nothing but a marketing scam. Yes they might remove a few unneeded registry entries or lost DLL files but the gain will be negligible. There are masses of these programs for sale and at best they are pointless, at worst they can trash your system. Messing about with the registry is not for the faint hearted, nothing but trouble lies therein unless you know what you are doing and very few people do.

The truth is that registry issues date back the days of windows 95/98 when the size of the registry was limited. Back then it was essential to keep the registry tidy. These days its nowhere near as important as XP and Vista use only the bits of the registry that it really needs.

If you choose to ignore this and insist on using these programs, make damn sure that you create a restore point before letting these things loose.

If you want to speed up your computer, the single most useful utility is msconfig.