X41 slowly dying, need help saving it!

[duke.solaris]

Hey all! I'm not very tech-savvy so I'm sorry if some of this sounds really basic.

I've had my X41 (non-tablet) for at least 4 years now - got it my sophomore year of college because I thought IBM was cool. The light weight and long battery life were excellent for school and it did everything I wanted it to. I had no problems that required use of the warranty, but also never bothered to uninstall those programs it came with because I'm not really too knowledgeable about computers. I've always been really happy with my X41!

About a year ago, however, the X41 started slowly down noticeably. Programs would take longer and longer to open, I would be able to have less windows open, there would be a lot more freezing, etc... Recently, these problems became much more intense. Start-up takes twice as long as it used to. Many programs either crash upon opening or run tuuuuuuuuurtle-slow. What's worse is that my wireless internet cuts out every few minutes - seriously, every few minutes it'll just die. I have to right-click the Wireless Network Connection icon in the corner and tell it to repair the connection - sometimes even that doesn't work. It doesn't matter where I use wireless, whether it's my home router or school network - it's the x41.

I tried running cleaning programs (AdAware, Spybot, TuneUp) to no avail - I don't think it's because of spyware. What I want to do is just reformat the computer to the way it was when I first got it - but being that it's an X41, there's no optical drive and thus no reformat CDs or Windows CD ... at least I don't think it has one, maybe I threw it away Once I reformat it, I'd also like to kill off those pesky useless IBM apps while keeping the useful ones (like the fingerprint scan). Can anybody help me save my X41 from a slow painful death?

[ideal-pc]

Do the X41's not have a recovery sector built into the hard disk like most others? I believe you wold access it through the access IBM button at startup. Failing that you could "borrow" an XP cd from a friend as your licence should be underneath the computer. You will of course have to buy an external USB optical drive to load it with or find a friend who can copy the XP I386 folder to your hard drive & install it directly. If you choose the option to install from your hard drive there should be plenty of "how to's" around, but you can always ask for more help on here later on when you decide what you want to do.