Welcome to the forum! If your X31 still has the factory recovery partition, you can press F11 at start-up to enter the recovery OS. Then choose recover factory contents.

If the recovery partition is not still there, you could put a want ad in the forum market place. The is probably someone here that can provide the disks.

But, in my opinion, a restore to factory state is a waste of time, since so many things will have to be updated/changed anyway.

And from personal experience, the x31 *can* run Win7 ... though without the eye candy.

Hey skip windoze all together! With 4 or 5 X31's floating around my house my favorite current system is an Ubuntu system with a Macbuntu overlay! It is Macdaddy and is incredibly fast. Officially...2 are Macbuntu, 1 is uBuntu, 1 is Debian and 1 is XP.

Ron

Personally, I found that a recently re-installed T42 and X31 with restored original factory installs work surprisingly well. Access Connections works (F5 will switch the radios on and off), the wifi cards work, so does all the other built-in hardware such as firewire, infrared and bluetooth. Connections to various wifi networks are stable with good signal strength. I feel that the need for many updates and changes has been overhyped, and given the many threads about problems with various incarnations of Access Connections, driver incompatibilities and automated software updaters I'd be very careful about updating anything that works correctly as-is. If it isn't broken, don't try to fix it.
Similarly, why try to run Win 7 on an X31, a machine that was conceived to run Win XP ? Because the neighbours have it? Most businesses on the planet are still running XP anyway. With some additional RAM and a larger harddrive an X31 running XP can still be a perfectly capable notebook for serious work or study purposes. Just use applications from the same generation, written for XP and a single-core processor.

The factory image leaves many security holes, lacks newer WiFi encryption. Other than having a fully updated cloning image, updates has to be done anyway.

The largest security hole is the user. Don't go afer porn and stay away from dubious files-sharing sites for instance. There are no versions of any OS without security holes, they find or create new ones constantly. My original factory install from the rescue disks (needed after a physical harddisk crash - 40 000 hours of use does that) had XP SP1. I updated that to SP2. Put a decent firewall, AV and utilities on it. Installed vital applications I use daily. Then backed the whole thing up with Acronis. This on a T42. Then I cloned the disk to another new one for use in an X31. the X31 came from eBay with XP SP2 and a load of updates (the lot also imaged by the seller of course). I always had trouble with the wifi: dropped connections, insufficient range (as in not working at 1 metre from the router), Windows Installer wouldn't work and an updated version of itself would not self-install (how ironic is that). Once the factory wifi and other drivers from the 2005 era were installed that X31 suddenly had full wifi range and held connections fine. AC works, hotkeys work, everything works. So I am leaving it the way it is now. I have these machines to work with. And they just work.
Just for the record: the first thing I do when I install an OS (Windows) and any application is to shut off all auto-updating functions. I'll decide myself if and when I want to update software that is working perfectly well. If I feel inclined to do so because a new version seems to offer real advantages, I wait and read comments first. If there are too many reports of bugs I decline.

Oddly enough one of my X31's hard drive that still has the backup partition since 2003 it will BSOD with the Centrino configuration. While using the backup partition does save that X31 plenty of time compared to my personal one without the partition in the end it's more headache just to make sure the reloaded system actually works.

With that said hindsight is 20/20. As long as you're not on a public network then I would agree that if it works it works.