This all started when I accidentally deleted media center 2005 from my laptop so I uploaded Home edition instead. finally found the media center edition and reloaded it. now I have two partitions on my hard drive one home edition and the other media how do i get rid of media center edition on my laptop. I am such a duffus. thanks for your help

... Right click My Computer option Manage, double click Storage, double click disk management [local], R/click the partition you wish to "zap" option delete partition Grrrr "...pentathol makes you sing like a canary" ... got brain freeze

Did you use a partitioning manager to create an additional partition. If not then I advise you to be careful deleting any partitions. If, in the process of deleting/ installing you created a smaller partition that didn't use all available space you could have ended up with two partitions. Or you somehow wiped the files off both the restore and WinMCE partitions and reused both those. Your computer probably came with TWO partitions. One that was hidden and one that contained WinMCE. If you delete the WinXP home you probably will need to do some repairs in order to get the computer to boot again. Finally, if I understand your original post you have downloaded both WinXP home & WinMCE. Asking for help with this is against the forum rules.

I will emphasize what Othehill said. If you have two partitions, one of them is probably the 'Media Center' restore image (unless you have wiped it out). If it's still there, you can probably save yourself a lot of grief by just restoring the image from that partition. There is probably a keyboard key sequence to start the restore program. Check the laptop's manufacturer web site for instructions on how to do that.