hey guys, i have a dell laptop thats two years old. I had some kind of hard core virus i think so i reinstalled windows xp pro (which I bought outright) becuase dell never sent me the disks for my operating system. I have a problem, i have no drivers for the internet and what not now and I cannot connect to the net. I cant even figure out what hardware i have. What do i do to connect to the net.

Somehow you connected to the internet to post this message-try Dell's website and see if you can download the appropriate drivers for your particular model. You could then copy them to a flash drive. Alternatively, maybe Dell would send you a CD for a small fee.

The website at http://support.dell.com/support/dow... will allow you to download all the drivers you need. Just enter your service tag number (found somewhere on the laptop) and download all the resulting files. Put them on a CD or flash drive and transfer them to your laptop. You can then run each file you downloaded, which will install a specific driver. Once you have all those done, restart your computer and everything should be OK. -Ryan Adams http://RyanTAdams.com

Dells normally have a partition on the drive with an image of the system as it came from the factory. If you wanted to restore the system fom that image, it will have all the drivers. You could then use your XP Pro CD for another system. Try ctrl-F11 during a boot, or see the Dell web site for recovery instructions.