First of all a big thanks for all the info, it all helps. With the motivation from you guys and a spare couple of hours i had this evening, i thought tonight im gonna get stuck into this.
I found the USB stick and went into the loft to dig out a monitor.
I thought im going to do the ubuntu on USB stick and plug monitor in.
I plugged the monitor in, turned it on and the laptop screen works. Not the monitor. It has loaded up the installed vista and runs like a dog, currently doing a defrag and disk clean up.
the first time i fixed it i had read about the memory needing to be reseated, so i tried that and it worked. when it broke the 2nd time i tried the memory again but it did not work.
Since i have mentioned it on here i tried the memory thing, unplugged everything i could unplug, re plugged it in. I even tried swapping a hard drive from another old acer laptop the mother in law gave the misses before this one. (there is a pattern of the mother in law buying lame laptops every year which only last a year. My parents got a macbook 5 years ago and it still works fine)
before when i tried all the other stuff and turned it on there was no noises to indicate windows had loaded, nothing on the screen but the HD was spinning.
I am totally confused as to why it has just started to work when i plugged the monitor in, and why it did not work on the monitor and the lap top screen works.
Its an acer so there is something wrong with it.
I think i still should try get ubuntu diagnosis on it to see what it has to say about the hardware
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regards onoff's post i think i should follow and get windows 7 on it.
I have just bought a copy of windows 7 to run in parallels on my macbook for running electrical cert software. I am guessing i will need a key for it if i try install on the acer, been as i need the key code for my macbook.
Of course i am reluctant to pay for proper key code for the acer as its not worth
