Thanks ZH
Spent many an hour looking at sites on the web, and it seems that unless you have a xp disc supplied with the computer you are in a pile of poo
I have got the laptop into dos and it says that 'hal.dll' file is there so I am assuming that the file is corrupted.
So my question now is how do you open this file in dos and can I do the same with my desktop and copy the file word for word to the laptop?