hello everyone. i have a niggling little thought in the back of my brain which i'm hoping all the good people of daniweb may be able to give me some second opinions of...
i have currently come into posession of a vaio VGN-NR21J, it originally came with visa home premium 64bit... however, the previous owner for some reason put a 32bit version of vista home premium with a dell OEM. not a huge problem i know, but this is where the conundrum lies.
the current vista has NO vaio drivers at all. no wireless, no keyboard functions (volume etc), shortcut buttons do not function blah blah blah. fortunately, sony put a sneaky little partition into their hard drives for system restores.
as i have tried several time to install drivers etc with absolutely no success (the computer just ignores them outright!?) i am thinking of using the restore partition to put the vaio back to it's original factory settings.
the main problem i have is that because the previous owner installed a 32bit DELL version of windows, which isn't the original, i don't know if it'll just screw everything up and leave me with a dead lappy!
any thoughts would be much appreciated.

If your able to access the restore partition and start a restore, it won't matter what is on the C: drive. The restore process will just overwrite everything. You will want to backup your important data, and I sugguest you make an image of the whole drive just in case something craters during the restore.