My laptop now has a super-fresh install of Windows XP on it. As it happens, I couldn’t find the restore CD for it, but the restore disk for my Dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop worked fine, bar some issues with the product key which were sorted out with Microsoft over the phone, and the lack of drivers and utilities which I’m now downloading from their respective web sites. That said, I have saved some time thanks to the recovery CD including Service Pack 2 and a number of the security updates released since.
Though I am going to need to re-install lots of software over the next few days, the machine is already noticably quicker, and it’s now got NTFS on it instead of FAT32 so it should make better use of its 20 GB hard drive. Looks like I have an “interesting” weekend ahead of me.