Should have said mostly dead. Or dying. The drives appear in Windows and I can browse them, get some stuff off them but there are obviously bad parts of the drive that can't be read now.

It's back to working order. Downloaded a Dell OEM Win 7 ISO. I expected to enter a key but it didn't ask for one.

It took soooo long to complete all the updates. First some updates, reboot, install SP1, reboot, more updates, reboot, even more updates, reboot, and I think there were even more. Why can't it do them all in one go. Slow laptop too so it took ages.

Surprise surprise, she finally came to pick up the laptop last night. Just paid for the part.

There's some site that bundles all updates up to latest, for free. Can't remember the url but it's supposed to install everything in one go.

I got the one for xp many moons ago but never bothered with it. I'm pretty sure they do/did win7 too.

Forgot about that. I used to use that with XP when I did reinstalls. Not sure what it was called. Didn't think about using that for 7. Maybe I'll see if it's available.

Nlite?