Thats what i was wondering. All you would have to do is dump your exsisting windows partician on an external and then transfer it to another computer. Aprone, correct me if i'm wrong on this one.

I'm not sure, sinse it depends upon how bust the machine is. I was only visualizing getting a new machine if the harddrive of my old desktop is completely unrecoverable and I have to buy a complete new one.

Sinse obviously microsoft in their infinite greediness don't make xp machines anymore (getting this laptop with xp was a struggle, and I only managed it because my brother bought it late in 2009 and didn't use it).

that is however only if I need a new machine. If my old desktop can be fixed by some other method, even a complete harddrive reformat then that will be fine, however the message I'm getting with xp repare are slightly more dire than that, talking about windows not being able to read boot files on my harddrive and 30 percent data corrupted.

I'd be surprised if it was! irrepairable, sinse my last desktop worked solidly for four years, and when it finally died it was actually a hardware death, ie, I stuck it on and the drive went clunk instead of spinning up properly.

I do admit I use my computer a lot, for everything from watching dvds to playing music and listening to books, which probably has something to do with the ware out time.

For starters Windows XP is no longer available and officially hasn't been for some time, thus you can't buy a new copy of XP. Also a lot of people are hesitant to upgrade, the same happened with upgrading from 98/ME to XP. People had this strange idea that XP was rubbish. Of course I haven't used 7 yet so I'm reserving judgement.

Assuming the physical drive is broken that's not expensive, you can easily get a hard drive for £40. That's a Western Digital not a no name knock off. That said data corruption doesn't necessarily mean the drive is broken, it might just mean the data is garbled including the data of the boot files, but it'd take something worrying to cause that much data corruption without warning signs before hand and without physical damage.

This is why I wish there was something like Apple's Time Machine in Windows, you really do need it.

Well good news, though news that makes me eel rather a prat.

I got a chap I know who's a professional programmer to look the thing over, and the first thing he said was, ---- this isn't xp repare, it's a virus pretending!

The programs menue was empty, which is why I couldn't run any avg, however I'd forgotten about the system tray. The chap just ran avg from the system tray, scanned documents and settings folder, avg munched the virus and now it's fixed.

I should've really been more suspicious and am kicking myself, sinse at the time, I was running a virus scan with avg, and avg detected a threat just before the message appeared telling me I had a crytical harddrive error and to restart the system.

what I should've done is ignored the message, continued the avg scan and let avg munch the virus, sinse obviously if there was a crytical error it would've been more likely to show some sort of problem han just bring up a message.

Thanksfully this means my computer is! now fine.

In terms of file restoration, that's another thing avg pc tuneup will do, restoring your drive to an earlier state and rescuing any deleted, or overwritten files, which is helpful though I've not had to use that feature up to now.

As to windows 7, there are two principle reasons I'm reluctant to upgrade.

the first, and less crytical ais that I won't be able to run doss games like fallthru or eamon delux anymore, though admittedly there aren't too many of these I play and Phil vlasac at least has stated he's going to rewrite propper windows versions of his games.

More crytically though, I'm concerned over the layout in windows 7.

For literally 15 years I've had a very strict way of laing out my start menue, desktop shortcuts and installed folders.

For instance, I only have desktop shortcts to programs I want to use shortcut keys for, such as outlook express. All my games are contained in a number of folders in my programs menue, organized by catagory, eg, one older for audio games, another for if games, another for useful programs like avg etc.

I then have further indexes by developer.

so, if I want to play Gma tank commander, i know just whre to look.

It's this aspect of windows 7 that worries me.

I don't particularly want to be troubled with microsoft's silly ribbons, most recently used this, context sensative that, and scrolling the other.

Call me a control freak, but I like to know where things are, and where I put them.

If there is a way to fully organize and group program shorctus in windows 7, without! all the silly context sensasative stuff, I'd deffinately like to know about it.

Yes, I know there is a search box, but I don't really want to have to search for stuff, I'd rather just have it with a few arrow key presses, as indeed I have in windows 95 and xp for the last 15 or so years!

That's what I've heard, because windows 7 doesn't have menues anymore. I have heard of a program called classic shel that's supposed to fix the desktop to a classic form sinse so many people find the interface annoying, but how efficient it is I'm not sure.

Why microsoft couldn't just include a classic view in windows 7 I have no idea.

In terms of games, I actually have several catagories, one for audio games, one for if games, and some for different types of graphical games too, and it's this that worries me about windows 7, sinse I've been using this layout literally sinse I started playing around with organizing my old laptop when i was about 14.

Maybe someone who uses windows 7 could confirm this, but certainly from what I've heard the general layout and interface are bloody stupid, and annoying to sited and vi users alike.

The programs menu on my computer running Vista causes jaws to stop responding, so I've gotten use to using the command prompt and windows explorer for everything.

There's a trial version of office 2007 on said computer, and even with most of the capabilities locked, I can tell that ribbons are evil. Microsoft was apparently thinking that, since they couldn't make the system noticeably better from its predecessors, they'd have to seriously mix up the interface to make it feel new, thus screwing us all over royally. Thanks, Microsoft.

I have a laptop with windows seven on it now. My brother did a reinstall of window becouse the thing wouldn't boot and it was easyer to put seven on it then find out why vista wouldn't boot. Anyway, Windows seven reminds me alot like the mac. More like a mac with a start menu tact on then a windows xp with things moved around. In someways it looks nice but when you got things the way you want, on your XP machine, it can be a pain in the back side to get it that way in seven. As for the ribben, think of it as a menu bar of menu bars that only shows things, for the most part, show things only related to what you got up at that time. This can be a good or a bad thing depending on how good the computer is. To me, the control pannel is a bit of a mess. It can be hard, at times, to find what you are looking for on the control pannel. On the other han, Windows explorer looks nicer in seven. I can't explain it. In short, it looks like MS tried to coppy apple, but it came out looking different. I can see where people get lost in windows seven. You have alot of different places you can put shortcuts to programs and the like. This includes pinning them to the taskbar.

I had this discussion with a few friends of mine yesterday. Ribbens are actually easier for sighted people to locate things with. Not for me though, and I felt rather trapped. XP is going dated, and ms's new OS, windows 8, is going to have ribbens in more places, such as such a core thing as windows explorer... So eventually I just decided to invest in getting a Macbook pro. It has really decent hardware, a quad core 2.5GHZ processor is a lot of processing power, so it should last me for a while.
I find that apple builds their devices to last a lot of time while staying current. As an example, the iPhone 3g which was released in 2008 which started with iOS 2, was upgraded up to 4.2, though it did miss a few notable features like multitasking. The iPhone 3gs which was released in 2009 is actually going to get iOS5, and this time, it's not losing on any features, even though it has only half the resources of the iPhone 4.
If we look at microsoft or Nokia though we see an entirely different situation.

They're working on Windows 8, aren't they? At this point I have no idea what the reasoning would be. Windows 7 makes sense just because of the huge unpopularity of Vista. I imagine that half the popularity of Windows 7 comes from what it follows.
When did Windows 7 come out? Two, maybe three years ago?

Windows Vista's overall restrictiveness when it comes to "legacy" programs is a huge annoyance (and just the tip of the iceburgh).
But I don't really feel like throwing more money at Microsoft to clean up what shouldn't have been a mess in the first place. It's about like Windows ME for me--more irritating than their predecessors, but it's what I'm stuck with, no point in bothering with a new system that could well wind up with the same difficulties when the inferior ones are at least stable (sometimes).

My windows 98 won't boot at the moment, and my XP laptop had a motherboard problem that's of questionable efficiency to try to fix. So I'm stuck with a vista and an ME, neither of which likes Brian Smart's sword game.

It's just a small game that went up as an example to illustrate how the mouse could be used in audio games. It's pretty simple--people come at you with swords, and you have to time when you swing your sword to block or attack. It works fine on XP, so it got backed up off of my laptop with the motherboard problem, and I put it on dropbox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16520690/Sword.zip