[lasal]

I obviously had severe malware and ad-ware and spybot weren't enough - wish I found this sight before i got desperate. I re-installed windows XP from the disks that came with my Dell Inspiron notebook. But I am afraid i made things worse. it won't let me re-install other programs and I get this blue DOS-like screen that has a lot of writing starting with something about "serious error...." but it goes black in about 2 seconds and the computer is turned off. Is these something I can do to save my laptop - even if I can't save the files that were on it! Thanks, LASAL

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. See if you can get into the bios, set boot options to boot to cd first, put the windows install cd (or the Dell recovery cd as the case may be), in the drive and re-boot. I would suggest a clean install, so re-format the hard drive and start over.

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. See if you can get into the bios, set boot options to boot to cd first, put the windows install cd (or the Dell recovery cd as the case may be), in the drive and re-boot. I would suggest a clean install, so re-format the hard drive and start over.

[lasal]

I did that - deleted partitions and tried to start from scratch with reinstall of Windows XP. Now I get a DOS screen right after restart that lists Windows XP twice - both descriptions identicle. I shut down and tried again - still got double listing - almost as if it's loaded twice instead of re-installed. I picked the top listing and logged in. it seems to be functioning ok for games and notepad. I have not re-installed Office or internet connection yet. I wanted to fix the dual operating system first.
any suggestions? Thanks.

[dsenette]

yeah it looks like you got two versions of windows on there....so it's a dell recovery disk right? what was the actual name of the option you chose to recover with?

[lasal]

I used the INSTALLWINDOWS XP CD and chose install (it wouldnot let me choose repair). I deleted the partitions when it asked.