I'm working on a friend's Grandmother's olllllllld Dell Dimension 2400. It hasn't had an update to windows since sometime around service pack two and the hard drive and registry are crammed with pop up add games and apps thanks to her young grandchild installing anything and everything she saw.

I want to just burn it down and install XP but they don't have the disks and there is no partition with a repair copy. I *do* have the windows key code as someone was smart enough to adhere the sticker to the inside of the cabinet. I've also got to pick up some ram as it only has 256mb of it.......so anything and everything including opening explorer takes 10 minutes.

My question is: If I have a copy of my own XP lying around can't I just install with that and then plug in her code? I don't want to format it THEN find out that's not possible lol....I mean, how the heck does geek squad or any computer repair shop do it when more often than not they simply format and then reload some of the programs?

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

You need to build yourself an OEM disk. It's not too difficult with a bit of research. The best place to start would be mydigitallife.info forums and work from there.

Cool thanks for the website =) Lot of that is over my head unfortunately but it's a good place to start learning more. For the time being though, I take it I cannot use my copy of XP to put onto her computer simply using her windows key? I guess each disk has that specific key eh?

The puter would probably be ok once i get the 1 gig stick of ram, but it refuses to install SP3 in spite of the tweaks I've read about and applied.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

No they don't. But OEM serial numbers won't work with retail disk etc...

It COULD work, but you won't know until you try.