dead laptop

[pomm001]

My nephew brought round his laptop which has died
before it expired it was very slow to boot up its MS XP home
him being a teenager no doubt had endless bits of games and god knows what else running, it was using 80 % of its 256m of ram at idle.
But then it died or i suspect he had a go with the windows disk, now it just goes into set up.
I have been into set up and got it to boot directly from the CD
so far so good i get to a screen which asks to install or repair, if i go to repair it takes me around to the first screen again.

I then tried to do another install thinking that at least i can get windows to start and sort it out latter, but still no joy , it loads it all up but still returns to the first set up screen without starting windows.
I am now working well outside of my limited knowledge
any suggestions

 

[centaur]

Did you try rebooting it without the CD, after the reinstall ?

Is the CD a genuine copy of XP or is it a 'recovery' disk supplied by the laptop manufacturer ?

How old is the laptop and what make/model ?

 

[pomm001]

Did you try rebooting it without the CD, after the reinstall ?

Is the CD a genuine copy of XP or is it a 'recovery' disk supplied by the laptop manufacturer ?

How old is the laptop and what make/model ?

Yes
i changed the set up to boot from the hard drive after install and removed disk, i do initially get the windows screen but then goes back to set up screen

its the recovery disc supplied when the machine was new, all genuine

its a dell inspiron 8200 it must be about 3 1/2 years old


as i say i am out of my depth on this

any suggestions welcome

 

[wessie]

My Fujitsu Siemens laptop got progressively slower and hotter and eventually died. This was between 3 & 4 years old. I had transferred all the data to my desktop so decided to format the hard disk. When trying to use the restore disk the format routine crashed.

Some months later, when I needed to revive it, I stuck in a new hard disk drive and bingo, off it went. £50 well spent.

IME and from hearsay evidence, 3 years for a laptop hard disk is par for the course. They do not like getting hot and a progressive decline sets in. The CPU has to work harder to compensate for the flaky HDD creating more heat.....

 

[ianboydsnr]

Yes
i changed the set up to boot from the hard drive after install and removed disk, i do initially get the windows screen but then goes back to set up screen

its the recovery disc supplied when the machine was new, all genuine

its a dell inspiron 8200 it must be about 3 1/2 years old


as i say i am out of my depth on this

any suggestions welcome

i had one of these and the hard drive went, lasted 2 years

 

[STUBBS]

teeager computer its probably suffering from porn overload try a porn defrag

 

[Iain Hogg]

From memory, ignore the first request to "repair or re-install". The next screen asks the same question and this is the one that does the repair

 

[centaur]

Wot Ian said.

Some makers use a function key to activate the recovery disk. the process may ask you to load the recovery CD and power off, then power on and when a display shows, hit a nominated function key (F12 or similar) which then gives a restore menu. Did your nephew keep the instructions perchance ?