re-installing windows 7 question

[dragon]

My system is being sluggish and unreponsive and programs are always not responding. So I figured not would be a good time format and reimage the system. Problem is it didn't come with windows 7 disk just the partition with what I guess is the image.

So how do I reimage the system once its formated or is there a better way?

[Dominus Atheos]

The OEM's partition does reformat the hard drive.

[dragon]

The OEM's partition does reformat the hard drive.

Thats what I thought but I figured I better ask to be on the safe side.

[Tolya]

Would a good clean up be not enough? I have Win 7 running for quite some time now and I didn't need to reinstall it. Ever. It's not like Win 98 which you had to reset every year or so.

Ccleaner (www.piriform.com) is a good place to start, as is cleaning up any unneeded startup processes (you can do that from CCleaner too). Run a disk defrag, check if antivirus isn't clogging you up (Panda Security has a nasty way of making everything crawl to a stop).

[Glocksman]

The OEM's partition does reformat the hard drive.

Thats what I thought but I figured I better ask to be on the safe side.

The problem with using the recovery partition is that it also reinstalls all of the bloatware the OEM got paid to load up the system with.
What I do after buying a new system is boot it up once just to make sure it works, download all of the drivers I'll need to a USB stick, and then reinstall Windows from my USB install stick.

You can get both 32 and 64 bit install ISO files from here.
Choose the links under the "Windows 7 SP1 Media Refresh Digital River Direct Links (5/12/2011 new releases with SP1 included)" section.

MS has a tool that'll let you make a bootable USB stick out of the ISO, or you can just burn the ISO to a DVD after extraction.

You'll still need the install key from the Win7 sticker on your machine though, so make sure you DL the correct version of Win 7.