I have a four year old Acer Aspire 1680 which yesterday refused to boot, complaining about a missing hal.dll file.

This laptop came with a system recovery disk but not a Win XP install disk.

The laptop didn't see the system recovery disk as bootable. So no chance of repairing or reinstalling it from that.

I stuck in the Win XP disk from my desktop and went into Repair mode. This couldn't detect any installations of Windows on the laptop. So no chance of repairing it that way either.

I installed Windows from the desktop's disk and then stuck the laptop's system disk in to install drivers, etc. This worked and I now have a working Windows system; but, of course, I can't activate it as the laptop's product code doesn't match the desktop's install disk. And there's no wireless at all despite isntalling the correct drivers, and no LAN either - it always says the cable is unplugged.

Any ideas of where to go from here?

Install linux instead? How much pain will it be to find wireless drivers that work?

[Update] - Got the wireless working, and the LAN works sometimes, but the DVD drive has packed up. How useful will it be to phone MS and explain that I have two legitimate copies of XP but only one working install disk?