iano

Thanks Troy.

Just to clarify. When you say "format the drive" I take it you mean the C: drive. I can remember doing such things in the days of DOS but how do you do that nowadays?

Having done that I take it that all Dell drivers: for video, sound, usb ports ....and cd-rom will be wiped. How does the PC 'know' to read the XP disc when its had a frontal lobotomy? Is there some base level operating system that is sufficient to load XP that doesn't get wiped by a reformat?

I understand the drivers can be loaded again later. I'll just check on the Dell site that her notebook is listed,

Thanks btw. This should be a bit of fun.