I have a Compaq with an AMD and would love your sound drivers. I'll privately e-mail you my e-mail address.

I bought a demo box and they had it password protected. I booted the machine with Knopix and saw that the D drive appeared to be its recovery partition and copied that entire partition off to an external USB drive. I then used a copy of repartitioning program to redo the entire drive.

If you want to try and reinstall your old OS that is great. Five years worth of update packs didn't sound like a wonderful idea to me. Also I wasn't sure that I had all the original disks for all the programs so I ghosted my image and expanded it to the new drive size.

There is obviously more than one right answer to this problem. I just wanted to share my experience.