alright well I give that a shot and if it doesn't work I'll see about sending it back.
I don't know if I did it right (probably not
) but I transferred Gparted to a cd and booted in the laptop it opened up the gparted program correctly (from what I can tell) and I'm in the partition section and I clicked on the partition i wanted to use and went to "format to ntfs" now it just says 1 operation pending. Then I click apply. right track, or not?
I think the major problem, whatever it was, is fixed. I went into Gparted and formated the drive to ntfs. Then I reinstalled and everything went smoothly. I'm now in the process of setting up my programs, connecting to the internet, etc. A couple more questions right now:
1.) During the installation I was never once asked for the product key. Is there a way to do this once Vista is already installed, either within the OS or on the internet? I don't want to have to go through the process all over again once the trial period runs out.
2.) Do I need to install McAfee? I used a couple of other virus/spam killer programs that were free and downloadable and worked better than McAfee did (which seemed to scan for hours upon hours and never coming up with any of the problems that the other free ones found. I probably won't pay for the full version. I've seen on here other suggestions for free programs that I might try instead.
And Makaveli thanks a lot for all the help.