Thanks for the replies. Well the disk check has now finished and I am writing this from the laptop - seems almost as good as it was before! There are various programmes which won't work and the sound is shot though.

I ran the 'error check' on the c drive and it just came back saying 'check complete' - no info on if there were any bad sectors etc. Running defrag now but still don't really have any confidence in the drive.

I also can't find my repair cd - so I think I will get a new drive, up the RAM whilst I'm at it and just buy a new copy of XP and be done with it. Like you say will mean I have to spend a while re-installing everything but I really have no confidence in this hard drive now!

Weird that it seems to be working ok now though...

Anyway thanks for the advice so far.

Graham