[Cuckoo]

I have been given Sony Vaio laptop (4 years old) which had Windows 2000 loaded, spent out on new battery and memory and the laptop crashed roughly when the postman knocked with the items! I do not have the original recovery CD and cannot get past the black intro page which tells me that the system shut down and how do I want to restart it, I have chosen all possibilities with no joy. It attempts to do something, I see the Windows logo and then it crashes again. Will Sony help or do I buy some product to get me going?

[spot]

Sony sent out a Vaio CD install set when I asked them on the phone, no charge. Perhaps it depends on what model it is. Have you asked them?

[Cuckoo]

Sony has quoted me £32.61! Not a small charge.

[Hybr!d]

I probably just buy XP for £50 in you situation and do an upgrade at the same time.

Either way you don't have much choice.

[spot]

I'd be wary of pushing a Vaio up an operating system, what runs slick and happy under 2000 can go very gluey and slow on XP. If you can hike it up to 512MB and your processor's over 1GHz and that Vaio model has no XP driver issues then yes, XP is nice. If we knew the model we could make a better guess.

[Cuckoo]

To conclude, I bought recovery discs off ebay for £12 and everything fine.

[spot]

Perfect. I hope you get lots of use from the laptop.