This is one of 2 major problems:

I bought my packard bell off a friend about 6 months ago when we moved. It had service pack 1 but was due to upgrade. So I downloaded it and then next day the computer wouldnt load at all and had completely crashed - couldnt even get onto desktop, screen was just black. told my friend who i bought it off and he said that happened to him too when he tried to download it. so i had to give it back to him and he had to reload the whole of windows back on so all my files etc were gone. very annoying!

but now i keep getting things from windows telling me to get service pack 2 but i dont want it to crash again!

any ideas why it could be doing this and is it really necessary for me to have service pack 2.
please bear in mind i am not very computer savvy!

Thank you

is it a legit copy of XP or a pirated version?

did you get any discs with the machine?

service pack 2 is needed to do any of the updates