Ok so I'm hoping I'm putting this in the right location. I have a Gateway NV53 laptop, which origonally came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. It has an Hatachi 320 GB HD, 4 GB of Ram, and ATI onboard video chipset.

Initially I was using my laptop when I got a BSOD. Ran advanced RAM Test, RAM came back ok. Ran the Hitachi HD tools and it came up with a bad sector. Erased the HD using the utility (which actually sets everything back to 0, not just able to write over it again), did the performance test and it came back as being useable again.

Now since my laptop did not come with a copy of the windows 7 disk (I don't think the boot disk that Crap Buy was going to sell me for $40.00 would work in this situation anyways), I am trying to use my old XP disk just to get something working on it. But in the middle of installing XP, my laptop is now just randomly shutting down...no BSOD just shuts down. I turn the power on and it will restart the install and it will sometimes get further into the install and sometimes shuts down sooner, but it's not staying on more than 5 min at a time. It's not running off battery power, it's plugged in, and I've tried using other sockets in the house with the same result. Any suggestions...I just want to get something running. Thanks for any advise.

Can't help with the XP problem but contact Gateway and order the recovery DVD.

Why didn't you create the recovery discs when you first got the computer?