yes still under warranty
No additional hardware added
locks up after installing windows updates and Norton, but has locked up immediately after fresh install too.
When you say Compaq legally bound to provide a working O/S, as far as my knowledge goes, O/S installed on a seperate partition, when using the recovery disc I understand it loads in 'tools' to copy XP from d partition to c drive. Should I ask Compaq for a Windows XP cd instead?

thanks

Lee