ok done as you suggested, i now have on the floppy a square box with something that looks like a cog inside it and it says at the side of the box, install
ms-dos batch file
2 KB
is that the correct file

Yes. A file that has a ".bat" file extension is a batCH file.

Ensure there is a formatted floppy disk in the floppy drive and click on that install.bat file.

Follow the steps in the last paragraph of my last post.

i put floppy in the drive of the doddgy computer and it still says "remove all disks and press any key to continue"

Does this floppy work in any other system?

Is the problem system a brand name system? If so, what is the exact make and model number?

amd athlon 1800+

what will happen if i run this on my wifes system?

If her system has the floppy drive set to boot the system before turning to the hard disk, then it will simply test the memory until you hit ESCAPE to quit the program, remove the floppy, then restart her system normally.

So this problem system isn't a Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc?

the wifes computer is an ibm, can't find the bios setup

IBM is usually F1, or F2, or Del.

Hi Dan, first of all i would like to thank you for the help you have given me so far. Right, i got really frustrated with the memtest carry-on, wasn't getting anywhere so i decided to format the computer.
I inserted the floppy disk and started formatting the drive, after it says procced with format (y/n) I pressed y, I then got the following

checking existing disk format
recording curren bad clusters
complete
veryfying 39,20.47m

39,195.88mb total disk space
2.66mb in bad sectors
39,195.22mb available on disk

I then started to install windows from the cd rom, after about 1 minute i got the following message

SUWIN caused a general protection fault in module USER.EXE OOOB:OOFC

does this explain any of the faults