so my computer is completely overrun with viruses and spyware and is more or less non-functional. this happened once before, and i called dell support and they eventually talked me through a way to wipe the system clean by restoring the computer to its original, out of the box settings. i lost all my files and had to re-install office and everything, but it worked like a charm. i want to do this again, but can't remember how. i've tried googling it, but everything says you need to have your OS installation cd to do it, which i don't remember needing before.
is there a way to restore my original settings and wipe all my files without this cd (which i have misplaced over the years)? for reference i have a dell inspiron laptop running windows xp.
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