I had exactly the same problem. Vista ran without fault for 2 years then one day it crashed and I could not get it back no matter what I tried. All my computer geek mates said it was a hardware problem so I just replaced the lot and gave the bits to my nephew. He has since put it all back together with a fresh install and has had no problems
. I put win7 on the new machine and so far so good except I have to use office 2007 which I don't like, it kept giving me error messages with office XP. Means I have to buy more equation writing and math software to get back to where I was 3 months ago
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Mark