I bought a cheapo laptop, everything was fine until last week. It won't start windows, it tells you that windows needs activating and then when you click to activate it says it's already activated and takes you back to the log in screen. All you can do is go round in a loop. The place i bought the laptop from is sending me a XP boot disk but it hasn't arrived so far and i could do with the laptop working tonight. I've downloaded and burnt a XP CD, how do i get the laptop to boot from the disk?
restart the laptop and when press the F1 F2 or whatever the setup key is. In there will be an option to change to boot configuration. the primary boot device will need to be C: Save and exist then restart. hope this helps mucka EDIT : or even D: that should be....which ever your CD drive is anyway
It'll be in the BIOS. When the first screen appears when you switch the laptop on, before the Windows XP logo comes, it'll say somewhere on it "Press (whatever) to enter setup". It's usually DEL or F2. Hammer whichever key it says (if it doesn't say, try DEL first and F2 if it doesn't work). If the windows logo appears it's got too far so power it down and try again. A set of menu options should appear. You can fvck up your system royally with these options, so ONLY change boot device order to put CD first. A word of warning - installing an unauthorised copy of Windows can screw your warranty. If you only need web access or simple office functionality you may be better off for tonight with a linux live CD. These are free to download legally and once you've changed the boot order, it will boot a simple OS with Firefox, a media player and OpenOffice from directly from the CD without actually installing anything.
Cheers for your help I've discovered it's ESC to enter that BIOS thing with it being a Toshiba, i changed the boot whatsit to CD first but it's saying Media Error, the boot disk i've burnt must not be ok. I'll have to wait to receive the XP disk from the place that sold me the bloody thing.
