Partition formatting/Recovery help!

I use an Asus G73JH-A1 and I wanted to make DOUBLY sure on this so I came here to ask for help, especially since the ROG site seems to always be slow, down, offline, crashed or refuse to let me log in, this place was my next best bet for help that actually has active members >_>...

My laptop has been acting funky after almost 3 years of use and crashes/freezes/shuts off randomly or during random trivial tasks like moving a file from one HDD to another so, I've decided to recover my C:/ partition/drive. However I want to ensure a few things and ask here and hope for the right answers.

Recovering my FIRST Partition, or by using the F9 key during startup and seeing this: "Recover Windows to first partition only"

Does this ONLY wipe the 1 out of 4 partitions? Does it leave my D, E and F drive/partitions alone completely and only wipe my C drive that has windows on it?

and secondly, By recovering to factory reset, is this the same as reformatting? I'm hoping to get an Efficiency boost also by doing this because my games have been seamlessly getting slower or less efficient then what I'm used to on this gaming laptop. So my question is, is recovery the same aspect or doing the same thing that I'd expect as if I were reformatting this? But simply its called recovery because it's a Laptop and has this option? Or if I'm looking for a 'Cleaner Wipe' I should do something outside the F9-Recovery partition?

Thanks for any help I could get! I wanted to make sure these are answered before I continue further because my backup files are on the other partitions and I cannot risk losing all my data since I don't have an external HDD. x.x

 

With my apologize to double-posting - But, is there no one who knows this simple information? x_X???

 

Yes, it will only wipe the C:\ partition.

A factory reset will give you the laptop in the original state that it was in when you bought it, bloatware and all. If you want something cleaner, look into doing a clean install, there's even a guide for the G73 somewhere in the Asus forum.

By the way, have you checked your temperatures, maybe it's running slow because of dusty heatsinks and subsequent throttling.

 

Well, I don't mind the 'Bloatware' because I know I have a lot of cleaning and updating to do, especially with flashing the Bios and Vbios, I already know what needs to be kept and what needs to be removed. Though, what do you mean though by a 'Clean Install' ? and, is there any links to this Asus forum thread? I can't generally get into their forums because of heavy lag or it just never fully loads for me x.x Though, if there's a means of having a cleaner recovery-process, I'd especially like to know what method this is or, what's its difference if it were to clean it up better or make it run smoother.

As for temperatures, they seem to be the same temperatures that I'm used to, though, I get a feeling that down the road when I have actual money I'll have to repaste some thermal gel on the CPU and GPU even though I've yet to do such things in my life. I had opened it up earlier this week only to find that it wasn't really that dirty on the inside, the most dust and crud was at the hinges inside the rear-turbine roof-plate. Though, at the same time the most I'd go to do next is use an air compressor for the heatsinks since there may be dust and crud stored in there that I cannot see.

 

Here's the guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...lk-through-doing-clean-windows-7-install.html.

If you already flashed the latest versions of the bios and vbios, you won't have to do it again, they are stored on chips that are respectively on the motherboard and MXM board.

 

Ooooh! Really?! I don't have to risk bricking my laptop again?! That's great news XDD Thank you so much for the help ^^