Problem with Boot Sequence in Dell Vostro 3581

[passion_unlimitedd]

I have a one year old Dell Vostro 3581 laptop with licensed Windows 10. Recently the laptop has become very sluggish and takes ages to load applications. I wanted a clean windows installation on my laptop. I have a windows installation disk (DVD). But I could not change the boot sequence to Optical drive or you can say I could not find it where to change. The BIOS is really confusing. It would be great if anyone helps me out with a step by step guide. Thanks.

Can I install Windows 7 on it. Its a Core i3 7th Generation Laptop.

 

[khalil1210]

Press F12 key after powering on the laptop. It will give access to boot menu.(1)

Are you using a hdd? If you upgrade to ssd it will be a major boost to responsiveness of laptop

Can you share the full system specifications? Ram, hard disk type and speed and processor and gpu if any.

Installing windows 7 is not recommended as you may not find drivers related to your laptop


(1) Dell Vostro 15–3558 Owner's Manual | Dell India

 

[Cool Buddy]

Windows 7 has reached end of life. That mean there's no support for it anymore. Which means security vulnerabilities might not get patched. Also, third party software developers are unlikely to support it to the full extent.

My suggestion would be 3-fold:

1. If the laptop came with a hard disk, you might want to replace it with an SSD. Replacing hard drive with SSD gives a major performance boost to laptops since laptop hard drives are generally quite slow. This can be done in two ways
   • If your laptop has an M.2 slot which supports M.2 SSDs, you can just buy an M.2 SSD and plug it in, then install Windows on this
   • If your laptop does not have an M.2 slot, you'll have to remove the hard drive and put in a SATA SSD
2. If your laptop came with 4 GB RAM, then you should upgrade it to 8 GB RAM. Make sure that the RAM you get matches your current RAM module as closely as possible. There are three possibilities here (use CPU-Z to find out which one applies):
   • There's a free RAM slot in your laptop: You can just buy another RAM module and plug it in
   • There's only one RAM slot in your laptop. You'll have to remove the existing module and plug in a new one
   • There's a soldered RAM on your motherboard. In this case, you'll be able to plug in a new module, but existing one is not replaceable at all
3. You don't need to do a clean install. Windows 10 has a built in Reset option. Open settings and go to Update and Security and in there, select Recovery. There will be an option called Reset this PC. Click on Get Started. Make sure you backup your existing data.

If you want to do a clean install however, it is easier and faster to do it with a Pen drive. Take a pen drive of at least 8 GB. Download Windows Media Creation tool and run it. Point it to your pen drive and select the option named something like Create bootable media for other computers.

Once done, restart your PC. Keep an eye on the first screen which appears. It will say something like Press F9/F10 to go to the boot menu. Press the key and select the Pen drive to boot. Then proceed to do the clean install.