Anyways, the first thing I did was make a set of recovery disk (3xcds) using the HP Recovery Manager utility. The next thing I did was to uninstall some bloatware that came pre-installed. Then installed some programs I need and some drivers.
Everything was going well until I attempted to install an Adobe CS5 product. After trying to install, I got a message that some components of the software failed to install and that it might not function properly due to this.
Prior to installing the Adobe software, I made a system restore point manually. Since I wasn't sure what exactly what successfully installed and what failed... I decided to just restore my system to the restore point I made rather than trying to uninstall the programs.
I selected the restore point, hit "restore" and after a minute or so of what seemed to be the restore process doing its thing - I got this message: System Restore did not complete successfully. Details: An unspecified error occurred during System Restore. (0xc0000056)
I tried restoring to an earlier restore point - failed. Got the same message. Also tried quitting all running programs, firewalls and antiviruses. Same fail message.
I tried restoring system in safe mode... actually not sure it was safe mode. i hit F8 on startup and it took me to the HP recovery manager that offered several options, one of which was system restore. I selected that. System restore went through the motions but failed. This time I got a window suggesting to do some sort of recommended restore. It said that Windows will automatically figure out which restore point to go to according to when the system was running well. This process took about 15 minutes. In the end I got another "fail" error message. Yet... when Windows came up I saw that the Adobe programs were gone. I can't really tell to which restore point it fell back to and I have no idea what exactly "failed" according to the message I got.
So basically, I'm just asking here if maybe someone knows what might be causing all of this and how I might be able to get my new computer to a healthy state. It feels lousy to get a brand new computer out of the box and already face these sort of errors and failed processes, not knowing what sort of junk it created on my system. I'm kind of contemplating using my recovery disks and starting over... but then again, knowing my luck... that will fail too and I'll end up having Windows not starting up at all.
I might add that I DON'T have the original Windows CD, because of some lame policy by Microsoft in which they no longer supply their installation CDs with new laptops, even though Windows is installed. So unless you pay extra to purchase the CDs, you're stuck with the recovery disks (which you're allowed to create once, by the way).
Looking forward for some advice on what to do. THX!