Clean reinstall on HP netbook

I'm not sure this is the right forum for this question, but then again: lots of people seem to have comparable problems, so here goes:
As my 3-year old netbook was getting very slow, I decided to get rid of all the junk at once by completely reinstalling the OS (Win7 starter). Now, there is a very easy way to this with the Recovery Manager (as described in the support papers on the HP site), but that didn't work for me. This may wll be due to a faulty HD; I've no way of testing it as my C: drive is now reformatted. So what next?
I was not completely unprepared; earlier I made:
- a USB-stick with the 'HP USB Recovery Flash Disk Utility' (HP45774). The stick does contain, I think, all or almost all of the contents of the recovery partition. (NB: you need a 16Gb stick and this is a trick you can do only once.)
- a recovery CD on an external CD drive, although without a 'disk-image' as by then the system had grown much too bloated already. (should have done that straight away after I'd bought it, although I'm a bit at a loss as to what storage medium would be used).
These two means should surely be enough to restore the thing to factory settings? However:
- The memory stick should be bootable, but isn't.
- Booting from CD works, but the Recovery Manager can't seem to access the diskimage on the usb-stick. (Although, when I call up a command prompt, one of the other options, it is readily available.)
So I don't really know what to do now. I'm thinking of two options:
1. In one forum thread it was said that the stick thus made 'often' or even 'usually' isn't bootable, as it should be. The advice was to make it bootable, using EasyBCD. That's easier said then done, I found; no luck so far. Can anybody help me with some more specific advice on how to do this? (The stick does contain a boot directory, bootmgr etc.; it clearly is supposed to be bootable.)
2. Following the advice in other threads, I downloaded the whole 1.7Gb WAIK, just to get hold of imagex.exe, which i then put on the memory stick. As the bootable 'recovery CD' does provide a command prompt, I could, supposedly, 'apply' the image base.wim, which is also on the stick, to 'drive D:' (under these circumstances, that's the main partition). But as there's lots of other stuff on the stick (like FactoryUpdates), I'm afraid it will be a lot of hassle installing computer-specific drivers and stuff.
Can anyone give me a tip on how to proceed?
Mabel

 

You're right, of course; that would be the sensible thing to do. But it's become a matter of principle to me: I just can't stand it that I'd have to pay again only because the software isn't doing what it promises to do. And as for 'upgrade': with all the dismissive talk about Win7 Starter I still fail to see even one argument why upgrading would be of benefit to me.
Mabel