Before you go through the pain and heartbreak of restoring the drive, have you:

1) De-fragged your drive, this will not lose any data files.

2) Scanned your drive using an app called RegCure?

Personally, the very last thing I would want to do is re-format the drive.

Yeah... drivers are a major PITA when rebuilding a computer from scratch for the average computer user... if you don't have or can't acess the recovery partition many manufacturers use.

Sorry guys, probably should have updated this thread earlier!

I did a reformat.

The only thing I really wanted to keep was my folder with all my photos and videos in it, other than that there was a lot of useless programs that the guy who built it put on there.

I got a copy of Windows XP Professional and just reloaded it on my computer.
I had to get into the BIOS and change the order things started up in so the DVD drive loaded first... THAT was scary for me but I did it!

Everything seems to be running smoothly now apart from my sound, but I have yet to tinker with that to fix it.

I am still seriously considering Windows 7, a friend of mine can get it cheaper because he is a student (not much but hey, a discount is a discount)

Thank you to everyone for your help!

PS - when I loaded it on it never asked for my key!
I don't know if that's because I didn't do an actual reformat reformat, I just loaded the disk over the top and it deleted everything itself.

So I spent ages holding my laptop over my head writing the key down for nothing (my screen is stuck open lol) :rolleyes:

EDIT - Finally found the sound card drivers online, yay.