I seem to have the reverse Midas touch when it comes to Dell Laptops and its put me in a bit of a shit situation. My flatmate has two old Dell laptops which he hasn’t used for a) about a year and b) probably 2 – 3 years. I’ve been using them as his AOL broadband guff won’t install on my own laptop. Now it looks like I’ve f**ked both of his laptops, which I haven’t and I think he probably knows it, but with him its difficult to tell how seriously f**ked off he is. In actual fact I think it comes down to them not being used in a while and XP being way behind in updates and imploding. Anyway, flatmate politics aside as I don’t really give a shit about it (moving out next week), I’d still like to get them back up and running so would really appreciate some advice if anyone has experience of rebuilding XP, especially on Dell laptops.

Laptop a has (had) Windows XPsp2 on it. Worked fine. I’ve been using it and yesterday Windows update asked to install SP3. I clicked OK to this, let it run through the update which it completed than requested a restart to finish it off. On rebooting I got the blue screen, its now f**ked. In the blue screen message it mentioned updating BIOS, disabling drivers etc etc. None of which I know how to do;

Question – does anyone know how I would identify what is actually causing the problem?

It doesn’t even start in safe mode, it lists a load of Windows32/Drivers files than goes to Blue. I have a Dell Windows installation disk but this allows me to either repair using the admin console – if I knew what was causing the problem I might be able to do something; or I can install windows, but if I try and install it on c: it syays “Windows is already installed on here.Installing multiple OS’s can cause problems.

Question is – How do I get Windows to install afresh, overwriting the current installation?

Laptop b had Windows XPsp1. It was already f**ked when I tried using it as it kept freezing up after 5 minutes complaining about SVChost errors. I went through a bunch of things to try and fix it but was caught in a circle of not being able to update stuff before it froze. This meant I kept having to power off using the button as it wouldn’t shut down properly, but eventually it didn’t come back on, complaining about not being able to find an I/O device. Again, this just needs a fresh installation, so same question ultimately as above.

A mate is also sending me his Vista disc to install that, but with being a few years old I dunno if the laptops will cope with it. As long as they work, however, it doesn't really matter but getting XP going would still be preferable.

Laptop A:
Do this – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx

Laptop B:
Run the diagnostics on the memory and HDD from the diagnostics CD – I suspect a hardware failure here.

Let me know how you get on.

David.