On Dec 5, 5:44*pm, Karl Townsend
wrote:
Thanks for the advice. I've been trying all day. The install error I'm
getting is from the CD. I found a step by step guide and I'm doing it
right. My old CD has a bad spot.

This may be dangerous, I'm downloading a new bootable CD from pirate
bay. I'll try it with my licence tonight.

I do have a second old 'puter here. It runs XP and has my control,
ACAD, mastercam, and some special visual basic apps on it. The second
two are home copies from when my son had legal access. None of this
stuff runs on W7. My goal here is long term - I need to be able to run
my shop stuff on new computers as the old ones die.

Thanks for the advice

Karl

Well, here's something else to chew on. More than once, I've had
computers fail in the middle of installing XP, complaining that they
couldn't read some file or another off the CD. Well, they may not have
been able to read, but it wasn't the CD's fault at all. In at least
four cases, the culprit was faulty RAM. Replaced the bad RAM, and the
computers loaded up right away. Go figure.

Before you go much further, you should get a good memory test -
Memtest86, or there's one from Microsoft that's less extensive, but
still pretty good. Both of those are free, and may save you a lot of
hair pulling.