bloody windows

[sulky_uk]

Heres a little story for you all...are you sitting comfortably?

a few years ago i bought a laptop, nothing special but i got it cheap in a us base in iraq. A few months later i won a gaming samsung laptop at a lan i attended so i gave the 1st laptop to my dad.

fast forward 4 years and my dad has got himself a new laptop and given me back laptop #1, it had all the relevant windows updates on it, but it was a bit slow due to having lots of crap installed. so i thought a cheeky little reinstall would do......but where are the recovery disks dad?

no probs i thought, i always travel with a copy of win xp when i take my samsung with me, so i reinstalled, the 1st laptop had a xp number on the bottom, did it work? did it f**k, its oem isnt it, no probs i thought my sister has an oem disc that she got when i built hers.....oh no she doesn't she got a new laptop and threw it out......i know ill try the number on the side of her old computer...oh no i wont its oem as well

can any one help ?

bloody microsoft and there bloody differant versions of xp

[Bob]

can any one help ?

Is there perhaps a recovery partition on the laptop? Many laptops come with one of those (you can usually access it by pressing some key (F8/F12/Delete) during start-up.

But if it's just a laptop you're going to use for simple web browsing and similar, one of the following options is probably to prefer:

• Ubuntu
  
• Kubuntu
  
• Linux Mint
  

And yes, they are all easier (and faster) to install than Windows XP. And some might even argue that they are easier to use...

[sulky_uk]

cheers bob and to pen for his email, ill get home tomorrow and ill look at my options then, using another os might cause issues with the old  driver required for this laptop

[Bob]

using another os might cause issues with the old  driver required for this laptop

Not necessarily. Most Linux distributions have come a long way the last couple of years, also regarding regarding native driver support for various old hardware. And the benefit with any of those three I mentioned (and most other distributions as well), is that they all come with a LiveCD, meaning you can boot directly from the CD to verify that it actually works on your laptop before installing.

[b00n]

Linux is pretty good with support for old gear, it's generally new stuff that takes a while.  I'd try ubuntu to start with.

That said, I have a spare legit license key for pretty much any generic flavour of xp, which ought to work. Let me know if you need one.