Hi, hope someone can help... We just bought a second hand laptop (a sony vaio) it was working fine when we got it yesterday, we took it to our local pc shop to get a wi-fi card and he put the software on. When we got it home we were trying to get the internet sorted out and had to phone bt, the advisor was talking us thru the steps (we want our desktop on broadband and the laptop on wi-fi). he told us to connect the ethernet cable to the laptop and log on to the net, at that point the power cable was knocked and it turned off. We turned it back on and it went on to the screen which says windows was interupted... We have tried to reboot in all the different options - in safe mode we get a long scrolling list with things like system 32 and drivers mentioned, in all other options it just keeps looping from sony screen to windows xp saying press f12 for network reboot (but f12 just loops it again). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

It looks like you will have to do a repair, booting from the original backup disk, or operating system disk.
I take it you were given one.

It may be on a partition on your hard drive, in which case you should have made a cd from it.

Hi thanks for your response. I am just trying to reinstall xp but it wont accept my product key????? It keeps saying that it is invalid and it bloody isnt!!!!! Gonna throw it thru the window soon lol

Where did u Buy the laptop from?

Make sure your product key consists of 25 characters, in 5 blocks of 5.

If it does, but still doesn't work, you can cntact Microsoft, who may issue a new one.

If you are going to reformat the drive from the cd prior to installation, it should work, otherwise it may be that if you are just repairing, the disk doesn't match what is already on the computer

Just a thought.