Is there anywhere on the net that I can download one of the above for free. I've looked round and can't find it without paying but this is my niece's computer so I am reluctant to spend on it. I would have thought it available on the Acer site but I can only find drivers on there and don't know what is stopping it from booting. It won't accept my Vista disk as a substitute.

Have you had a check to see if its got a recovery partition?

Alt + F10 key when starting up

Cheers

Rich

I'll have a look in a bit cheers Rich. It doesn't get far into the boot before it hangs and she left it trying for 10 hours yesterday

It looks like that is the answer Rich, many thanks it's reset to factory defaults so anything on there will be lost but it's better than what it's doing now and she might be a bit more careful in future. I suspect it may have been shut down mid update.