I am working on my Aunts Acer Aspire 5000 laptop. The original problem was that it would not boot into windows because it need hal.dll. I used the recovery disks and it got past that error, but still will not boot windows. I am not computer illiterate and have done all kinds of troubleshooting and followed different steps online. I am currently running a test on the RAM, one stick at a time. This first stick of memory is only 23% complete and it has already found 358,400 errors with the memory. I have not had a lot of experience with bad memory. Does this mean that the RAM is junk and should be replaced? I have tried EVERYTHING to get this laptop to boot into windows and nothing works. I cannot even do a clean install from the XP disk as it tries to copy the needed files to the HDD and different files keep failing. They took it to circuit city first and they said it was the HDD and they replaced it, but the same problem occured, so they put the old HDD back in, so that pretty much rules out the idea of the HDD being faulty, correct? This memory test is not 28% complete and it is up to 361,472 errors found. HELP!!