Return HP notebook to factory

[huffman]

My wife has an HP laptop that has gone nuts. It came with Windows 8 installed. I suspect it has a virus and I am not even sure she has an antivirus installed.
As you can tell I now little about Windows 8.
To restore it to factory settings, I tried continuously press the F11 key as soon as the power button was pushed. When something finally comes up it is trying to find a solution to the fix the PC. It will continue forever I guess (I know it went for 12 hours)
At some point it should come up with the option to restore the system, but it doesn't.

I could use some help. Thanks

 

[huffman]

OK no replies so far. I started over this morning by Pressing the Power button and constantly pressing the F11 key until something happened. Since I can not get images of the screen, here how it went.
1. Select the keyboard language. (I chose US).
2. Preparing Automatic Repair (Screen went blank and stayed that way about 1/2 hour).
3. Diagnosing PC
4. Preparing Automatic Repair (screen goes blank)
5. Diagnosing your PC

All it is doing is going in circles and doing absolutely NOTHING.

Any suggestions?

 

[Slavic]

Windows 8 and higher have the built-in antivirus Windows Defender, which provides a basic anti-malware protection. Of course, if it wasn't switched off and gets regularly updates (usually automatically, need only to have Internet connection). So I would suspect something different, from OS failure (problems with Registry, missed system files, damaged file system) or hardware problem (damaged HDD etc).

In such case, automatic repair may be not the best solution. I would suggest first to boot from external USB and look at the HDD content, whether HDD is working and it's possible to copy important user's files or not. At this step, any bootable USB suits, even with Linux. After assessing the damage (if it is) you can decide what to do next. If you can create the bootable drive with the same OS that is installed, like Windows 8.1 if it was updated from factory 8 to 8.1, then you can re-install OS with keeping user settings and programs. Maybe it's possible to use the last good configuration or System Restore, so re-installation will not be needed. But first try to determine a cause of failure.

 

[billmcct]

Try using the "esc" key at startup to get to the recovery.