I am using specifically non geeky computer language in this review because i am fed up of the techno babble you read in magazines trying to blow you away with uneccessary technical guff which is probably all practically correct but means not a lot unless you have experienced the problems first hand in the sofware environment. Back to XP... what has gone wrong in my case ? Well it is now not booting up and in fact lost the command language to boot it. I experimented with all sorts of settings and tried the F5 key to start up windows in safe mode or the F8 key to boot off the disc on start The opening screen said that the operating sytem could not be found after I had left a windows 95 boot up disc....so warning DONT LEAVE FLOPPIES IN THE DRIVE when not in use. operating system on disc... there is no way any of the manufacturers should ever think of selling you an operating system with a PC without also supplying you the disc with all the files that support it. My computer has never been attached to the internet so has not any of the patches for windows but I did install supplementary programs to it from The Win XP official magazine. Not being attached to the internet has meant I have not had to worry too much about viruses , though i still used Norton AV software, which was a problem because it needed activation over the net, so needed reinstalling periodically. Hope that was useful for someone. My case is by no means typical I assume. I have talked to a lot of XP users and many prefer the earlier versions of windows , so my advice to a new novice user would be to try maybe Windows 98, which I know has been used for years on internet connected systems. . BYEE