Well, the girlfriend as playing Micro Machines V4 and the game started maximising and minimising relly quick. It locked so i turned it off. On boot, it got stuck on the loading bar for XP.

Upto now, I've :

-Swapped hard drives with one that was working last week, running vista. It did not detect the drive correctly, its a maxtor and the bios told me it as a faxtrn D thn a few numbers, so Vista did not boot when i had no problems booting it last week

-Formatted nd re-installed xp on both drives - boots then as soon as i install nvidia drivers, it wont enter xp again.

Considering trying another re-install and forgetting the ide drivers but tbh Im not in the mood for messing with computers today. I've also been getting a lot of corrupt files on the C: which was the only ide hdd in the pc at the time, the 3 sata's are fine. At the time i put it down to the hard rive, but now i think my ide ports could be naffed? Or maybe its just a ide driver issue? but how, using drivers that came with my motherboard?!?

Cheapst option would be to buy a sata hdd to replace the drive, and flog the other drive if the ide ports are the problem....agreed?

Sorry about the lack of punctuation etc, hate laptop keyboards!