I was also considering buying one of these cds because I don't have the recovery disks for it...WINDOWS BOOT DISC DATA DISK 95 98 2000 ME XP RECOVERY on eBay, Utilities, Software, Computing (item 200138726901 end time 12-Aug-07 23:10:59 BST)

It looks quite promising...

BethanSims2 xx

I think bootdisk.com lets you make those for free. Not sure, but I don't think that's what you need anyway. What you'd need is this:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Retail

or this:

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Retail

You can't really buy a Windows 2000 Retail disk anymore, though, sorry.

Thanks, they sure are alot of money though...I'll keep looking to see if I can find it cheaper anywhere because the man who looked at my laptop says he can fix it for about £30 so I'm just thinking what would cost less or be more suitable in the long run

If the repair-shop man ends up needing to reformat, which may be the easiest solution, he's either going to give you a pirated version of Windows (which is actually very common for repair shops to do, at least around here, as I don't know of any around here that don't pirate), in which case we couldn't offer you support, or if he has to reformat with a legitimate copy, you'll have to pay for at least a license key, which is going to be up there. What you're going to want to do is buy a retail disk because if you buy an OEM, it cannot be installed more than once (so if you ever need to reformat again, you'd need to buy another one!) whereas if you buy a retail copy of Windows, you can install it over and over on the PC with the same license key, and if you want to put it on a new PC, all you have to do is uninstall it from the old one and then put it on the new one! With OEM or just a plain license you can't do that.

So, essentially, if you don't have the recovery disk that came with your PC, the best bet is to buy one of those products I liked to.

Kule thanks, do you know what sort of prices I could get a retail cd for? I live in England but I don't think that should effect anything?

BethanSims2 x

XP Professional Retail should be around £143
XP Home Retail should be around £97

This is just from converting prices over from Newegg (unfortunately they only ship to the US). Actual prices may, and likely do vary, possibly a lot.

Remember not to buy licenses or upgrades. If you're buying it from a physical store, try to get help to make sure you're getting the full retail version with Service Pack 2.