Hi again, I did as you suggested and took the machine back to PC World who replaced it with another one.

Just wondering – when you installed XP on yours, did you first boot onto the XP CD and use that to remove all the existing partitions and then create a new one? I’m cautious because the last thing I want is for this new one to become a brick as well!! (I’ve already created a XP CD with the SATA driver included and I know this works as of course I was able to install XP before).

However, I might then try to dual boot it with Vista once XP is on there as apparently that is the recommended way round of doing it according to this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529

Cheers,
Simon