ok, my laptop is a year and a half old, its full of s**t and i want to start again, i have a vista product key but no disk, what is the easiest way to go about wiping and starting from scratch?

likelyhood is that vista, along with a load of pre-installed software and all the drivers you’ll need to rebuild, will be hidden away on your laptop’s hard disk in a maintenance partition.

When it boots up, look for prompts just after power-on to boot to system partition or similar. What make of laptop?

format c:\

don’t you mean: format c: /s

Mine’s the nerdy looking one in the corner.