Acer Aspire 5000 series restore

Hi everyone this is my first post,so sorry if it's long winded

I have an Acer 5000 series laptop,aspire 5002wlmi
AMD Turion 64 1.6ghz
60gb
1gb ram

It had win Xp then i had it changed to win 7 and had the Acer startup screen took off,win 7 was not working well so i put Win xp pro sp3 and it's still not running right,it takes 5 mins to get to the desktop screen and when i open software this takes a long time, the cpu is running at 80 to 100%,i shut down and start again and it seems to work better but not brilliant.
I was going to do a system restore but i wasn't confident,found that 20gb of the hdd was used but there is nothing on the laptop,did i create a partition when i installed XP again if so has it got win 7 on that partition, i have removed all vids,music and photos,i have defragged,cleaned and run a scan with AVG these are all free versions,the only software on there is 2 photo editing and 1 web design all payed for.
The laptop shuts down ok.
I would like to get the 20gb back and have the laptop running right.
I have all 3 disks and system cd also i did make backup disks when i first brought the laptop,can i just put the backup disks in to restore the laptop,i also have tried ALT+F10 but this does not work,tried at different times off startup still no eRecovery screen is there another way to get to that screen


thanks for your time.

 

The 20GB hidden partition has XP recovery on it (the exact same recovery you have on recovery CDs). It was created by Acer in factory and it didn't change to Win 7 when you installed it.

You can delete it from Admistrative Tools in Windows - there is Disk Management there and it shows all partitions - you should be able to delete the partition altogether.

 

Thanks for the info
What do i do after i have deleted the partition,do i get that space back and just leave everything or do i install the backup disks

 

You get the space back although it's going to be an unallocated space - you'll gave to add it to one of the exiting partitions or simply format the HDD and create the partitions once more.
Backup disks are completely unrelated to this- you may use them first and delete the partition from new XP installation or delete the recovery partition and then proceed to reinstall Windows.

There's just one problem with this theory - recovery partition from Win XP shouldn't be 20GB in size that's more than Vista or Win 7 needed let alone XP. Are you sure that it's not one of your partitions? Anyway - if you have all your data backed up you can safely proceed to remove all partitions and then install XP.

 

Thanks downloads will try this tonight and let you no how i get on

 

Had a look in disk management and there is no partitions,it tells me that the capacity is 56gb and free space is 38gb and that drive C has 55gb ntfs healthy (system)

 

That sounds sensible - 56GB of formated space out of 60GB drive.
Assuming you have 17GB of your data on the drive (both OS, programs and your documents) everything checks out.

Back up your data on a different drive and proceed to re-install Windows.

On another note - check out SMART report for your drive. It's old and might be malfunctioning which may be a real reason things get slow regardless of what system you use.
That said you should stick with XP - the machine is too old for Win 7.

 

I have now restored the laptop to factory settings,as it only has Xp on it with no SP packs where can i download the packs and do i have to download all 3 or just Sp 3