I'm wondering if I'm getting the run around from HP so I'm seeking advice from more knowledgeable people like yourselves.

My husband gave me an HP desktop a1630n media centre PC for Christmas. It

was installed with IE7 sp2 which I used most of the time.

Everything was fine up until last week-end. Last Saturday after I turned the computer on. Ok I should note here that when I shut down Friday night my computer updated critical updates (I'm noting this because I'm thinking these updates caused the problem) Ok..Saturday I found the

computer to be very slow. At this time though, I was thinking maybe my server was the problem. After maybe an hour or so I did a virus scan (AVG) an online trendhousecalls scan, spybot, and adaware scan....all good. I also did a disk clean up. NO resolve so I thought I'd check opera browser to see if there was a difference in speed which I did note there was, so I came back to IE and still very slow. There I noticed the security alert on my task bar to update. I kinda found that odd because I have the updates to run at shut down but none the less I clicked on to d/l them. The d/l failed and a few minutes later I tried again.....got the message that the d/l was successful and now I needed to restart. This is where I knew something was very wrong. All programs started to end task in order to shut down. On restart I got an error message: windows could not start because file is missing \windows\system\config\system. and asked me to put in cds that came with the computer (which I didn't have) I clicked on advanced helped which took me to diagnostics. After the scan of all three hard disk scans.. smart short self, surface scan, and surface scan test2 all failed with error message of HD521-2W, HD535-2W, HD535-2W consecutively. I did not copy down results but I also did a sector scan and recall seeing one fail and one pass during scan.

I was then advised to do a system restore or recovery. Neither worked.

Called HP where they had me go into bios. I wasn't able to write down my steps in Bios at

this time but I do recall a list of HD and #'s ....I think four or maybe 5 which had none beside each one, except for one that had (applicable) the service person had me click on the one that had applicable, which led me to other areas I can't recall but whatever it was didn't work, so they then had me try recovery again using F10...failed. They said they would send me recovery cds.

Received them Tuesday. When prompted to put in 2nd cd the disc drive did

not recognize cd... message said wrong cd please put in disc 2 so I took the disc out and tried again. This time it worked but frozed at 27% (only 1% from the 1st cd) called HP and they had me start over from the beginning. The 2nd cd again was not recognized, but after taking it out of the drive, and putting back in it did work. This time it went to 94% when an error message popped up saying: cannot copy file: X:\windows\1386\Lang\PintLgdx.IM_ giving me the choice of try again or ignore. I clicked on try again many times with no success. Called HP again, and this guy tells me he wants to try a smart scan test because it could be my hard drive, so I tell him this has already been done, does it not show in my file. He says "no there is no mention of any smart scan being done"....sigh. Then he says "ok, you have called what 6 times now, and we don't need you calling 8 or 9 times so I'm going to put an end to this now and connect you to a hardware specialist and get this straightened out right now". Hardware specialist says they will send out another set of recovery cds......sigh.

Friday I checked my delivery status online and noticed the cds had not been shipped yet, so I called HP again. This time I got a friendly lady that...get this "spoke english". After giving her my case file number she went thru my file and I went thru everything with her that happened. After I told her about the smart scan I did and how it failed, She told me that it was listed on my file that the smart scan I did passed! She went on to say that if the scan of all three on my computer said fail I should get a new hard drive not cd recoverys. I asked if it is the hard drive and I use recovery cds would it work if the hard drive is gone(thinking this was why the cds didn't work) she said yes it would but I'm going to run into trouble again. At this time my mind is on overload and I feel so overwhelmed that I don't remember much more of the conversation, but it did end that she was putting in a rush for these cds and she would call me Monday evening to see how I made out.

What do you guys think? Should I be getting a new hard drive? Should I demand one? Are these recovery cds only a band aid fix until my warranty has ended? Am I getting the run around? I have no one that is computer savvy to advice me so I'm leaning on all of you guys. Thanks for any advice you can give me.