hi

i am traying to reformat my gateway 450sx4 laptop computer

trayed from bootup hit f11 key

trayed from command promp

help joe k

Welcome to D-A-L.

If this machine came from the "computer store" with XP pre-installed, there should be a utility to allow a re-installation of the OS from a hidden partition (usually D:). Within that, there should be an option to format C: and perform a "clean install" of Windows, thereby resetting the machine to "factory defaults".