lol, how did i know. rite basically packard bell run things a little differently. when you first load up the computer it does a thing called at tattoo. this basiacly writes the information of the computer, ie spec to the hard drive and then installs the nessecary information from the os disc. this basically stops people taking the packard bell discs and using them to put as many copies of windows of as many computers.

ive never tried to put a normal copy of xp onto a pb computer, but in theory it should work. however if it doesnt, tattoos can be a real pig.

the computer will be fine as you will already have one on the hdd, but when you reinstall windows it will write the drivers for the components you orginally had wen you got the pc. so if you had a new graphics card the drivers wont be installed.

the packard bell website is wikid though and you can get all the nessecary drivers by entering your serial number

now your computer proabbly didnt come with any recovery discs and instead will have asked you to burn some when you first booted it up, but most people, myself included, never borhter. this is an advantage because all the data is still on the hdd.

you may have got a red boot disc aswell, but you should be able to run the recovery from the hdd. when you first boot up the pc it should display noramally before windows starts, something like F5 for recovery or F7 or F11. this will take you into the recovery menu and will allow you to run a complete reinstallation of windows.

just take note you will not have all the nessecary drivers. but they are easily obtainable from the web and all the essentials will be there. it should be fine, just make sure you go into control pannel > system > hardwar >device manager the select the item you want to get rid of the driver. double click and then click the driver tab and uninstall.

most drivers are avaliabe from the maufacturer's website and if you dont know what that is you can get some component scanning programs and they will tell you.

to behonest packard bells are good machines and although things are different to noraml machines it is there for customer benefit. they just suck when you have a broken hdd. but as you dont you should be all good.

if it was just the graphics card and the ram then you shouldnt have aproblem as ram is controlled by a centeral generic driver so an increased yeild will just be automatically adjusted too. and graphics cards usually are named on the card itself.

but apart from that you should be set.

run through a recovery and yeah it should be all good.

depending on the machines date, there may be an option to run a recovery and keep your data, but on older machines it is not always an option, but if you boot up the recovery then you will know know. just load it up check then bomb out.

but sometimes they dont always save the data and ususally just that located in the my documents sections. so just move all the important data into them, but i would always make a back up just incase.

that should be everythink recovered to get you'se sorted

snowblind