Bernie you can indeed change the boot order in the BIOS, remember to press F10 when you exit to save the settings. After you can return to the BIOS and reset it to the original drive if you wish. Your video card is likely built into the motherboard, very few mass produced computers have separate video cards now. If you have access to a monitor there should be a spot to connect it to the computer to verify that the video card is working or not. You might Google 'video card stability test' and select a program to download and test the card, there are plenty of them out there. You mention that the problem computer is old. Perhaps the vents and fan are bunged up with dust bunnies creating a heat issue? Have you tried clearing this out? If you made note of the hard drive you could visit the manufacturers site and run some tests on it perhaps.

Zep, thank you so much for all you time and advise. I truly appreciate it. Can I ask you about the log I posted at 14:41 particularly the double entries? Acrobat.com Acrobat.com Ad-Aware Ad-Aware Adobe AIR Adobe AIR Corel Painter Photo Essentials 4 Corel Painter Photo Essentials 4 CyberLink DVD Suite CyberLink DVD Suite Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer HP MediaSmart TV HP MediaSmart TV HP MediaSmart Webcam HP MediaSmart Webcam LabelPrint LabelPrint etc? Why are there doubles? I have to log off for the night, but if you have any more suggestions I will check back tomorrow. Thanks again. Carol

I have the same DVD/CD burner on my HP computer and I did have problems burning DVD's after I uninstalled Norton and put Avant on my computer. I found out that I needed to shut down Avant when I burned DVD's or else it just didn't work right and kept running forever and then gave me a message that there was problems and I needed to try again. I think Avant's scanning was interferring with Sonic. Once I turned off Avant Sonic worked fine.

I agree with Raven here, I would not be taking a Celeron computer in for repair. That might well cost half the price of a new computer. You don't have a friend, neighbour or relative who might loan you their Windows XP CD? Explain to them that you do not need the license number as your license sticker on the side of the computer case is the one you would enter as you install XP. That sticker number is tied to the motherboard in your computer. (I suspect that if you have XP Home then you would need an XP Home CD) Recovery disks are bought at the time of the computer purchase. Or this is more often just a separate partition on your hard drive and the buyer should create a set of recovery disks. This includes all the 'free' extras the computer maker adds on. The XP CD is just that, a copy of Windows XP with nothing added As a side note you may want to suggest to Dad that he creates a set of recovery disks for his machine in case he runs into problems too at some future point.