Hi George Well the laptop is now sorted, and I'm annoyed with myself, and the dam thing itself. It turned out, that there was actually nothing wrong with the cd, instead, having read other Microsoft articles, regarding the error messages, (error code 7) it turned out to be a hardware failure. One of the memory modules had failed, because when I removed one of them, and then tried reinstalling xp, it went perfectly. The pc is now back up and running, after weeks of trying so many other things. Thanks for your suggestions, as I learnt quite a lot along the way. Terry