Hi guys. Hope you can help.

I'm not exactly an expert with this whole computing malarky, but I do know a little, well, enough to change out parts, ordinarily at least.

Anyway, I recently recieved an Advent ERT2250 laptop from a friend. But it only had 1 GB ram and a 70GB HDD. So I decided to increase the Ram to 2GB (Kingston) and the HDD to 320GB capacity (WD).

As soon as I recieved the laptop, however, I decided I needed to downgrade the OS from Vista to XP. This was done without incident, and all was fine. Anyway, having recieved the upgrade components, I installed them without wasting any time whatsoever, assuming all I would need to do was insert the XP disc and reboot the PC. Alas, this is where I am stuck.

I inserted the disc, and when I hit the power button, the disc spins, I think a fan comes on, but the screen remains blank. I tried discharging the power (using a method found on this board by removing all power sources and holding the on button, before replacing only the power chord and trying to turn on).

Basically, I have come up with a blank here. Nothing seems to be working for me at all. Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers.

Downgrades from VISTA to WXP can result in big problems that will create the problem you describe unless you are able to find and load all WXP drivers for all components. How certain are you that all drivers for WXP have been installed, and none from VISTA remain.

I'm pretty sure. The problem is its a completely fresh HDD, so there is absolutley nothing on it. But when I performed the downgrade, it was a completely fresh install, as I formatted the HDD first.

As for getting all the xp drivers, I had went to the website for the computer, and downloaded all the drivers there.