I have XP Professional. I have had 15 attepts at installing it - each one has resulted in failure. Mandrake installs first time - every time. Ok. So what's happened with XP so far? Well, under NTFS it lost quite a lot of files and then on the next bootup (I shut it down properly) I got the blue screen announcing this and it then recovered the files. Following this, it went into a boot - crash - boot cycle that I couldn't break other than by switching the computer off. Then I tried again and it did the same again - I had to reformat and reinstall. Several reinstallations later, it installed and stayed up for ooh about 8 hours. Then I shut it down, switched off and went to bed. Next morning I switched on and it had lost the activation number and produced an error code. It refused to let me in to do anything about it. Result - I'm very unhappy and will be using my rights under the Consumer Credit act to get a refund of my hundred and thirty pounds. Currently I'm using Mandrake which seems to be working quite well. I would have installed NT on my system but for the fact that NT doesn't want to work on a 4 gigabyte disk - it claims it's too big. Well, this is a warning to other potential XP users - don't buy it. Buy a Mac instead. Microsoft has just signed its death warrent with XP.

Must be you. Had XP since day 1, never had a problem. Havent formatted either. As they say... Computers are only as good as their users :-)

I formatted the disk every time prior to installation. I did the normal: Format C:/s followed by Sys C:

The problems your having are normally caused by a harddware error. Are you overclocking your cpu? Have you checked the drive for errors? Sandman

Clearly you didn't do enough pre-installation research. More than likely Xp doesn't like a piece of your hardware, you should check your setup at their website for compatability. Another common cause of installation problems is bad, or seated poorly, RAM chips. Try removing and reinserting them, and also try with just one in, then the other. Xp is a fantastic OS and you are definitely in the minority, quite how you can say Xp will be the death of Microsoft I don't know, as sales have grossed in the billions already, and that doesn't happen with a shoddy product. Millions are happy with it, a few aren't.

Using both XP and Linux -- Linux is not ready for "prime time." As a computer professional, we have an expression for problems like yours. It's an identity problem. That's ID-10-T. I repeat, ID10T.

Domocratic Anarchy I am an elderly woman - late 60's - know little of 'hardware things' - did a 'Clean' Install... ...if I can get XP up and running beautifully then you should be able to Did you check Microsoft's Hardware Incompatibility Site before Installing ?