I would offer just a word of warning on batteries. My Dell battery failed suddenly, 2 years to the day after I first switched on the laptop. I went on eBay to find a battery that was advertised as an original Dell, but at an incredibly good price. It came from Hong Kong in very good time, and looked absolutely genuine. It worked fine for about 6 weeks, then died. The guarantee was for 4 weeks, and the supplier never replied to my messages. I then bought a "compatible" battery from a UK supplier, which so far is fine. Both batteries together cost me considerably less than one from Dell, but this was not an enjoyable experience. :*

SD and srobarts- Many thanks for your information, and apologies for the late reply. I've been away and busy, so I will try the reinstall this weekend. I will let you all know how it went!

Maxbert

Success! Plus thread-related positive side-effect!
 

Old lappy re-install from old OEM disc a total success. I chose the "restore factory settings" option from the disc, this took about 15 minutes. Thereafter, armed with a suitable supply of beer, I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon downloading the XP updates from the Windows update site, rebooting regularly... :hmm:

Clean, uncluttered lappy now boots at lightning speed, and, here's the good bit, battery life has improved immensely! :ok: I would say that I'm back in the one to one and a half hour range, up from about 15 minutes.

I've installed AVG free, Eusing registry cleaner, D Link USB WiFi driver and some utility to update drivers (not a great success, some update files install fine, other seem to lack an installer...

Just some form of parental control to install, and here's a brand-new lappy for my son!

Maxbert