Okay, this is going to be kinda long. This laptop was gave to me a by a friend who said it was broken. It is a gateway md7818u. It had a disc in the cd rom labeled, "gateway, disc 1 of 1" the computer powers up, but does not boot into an operating system. It gives message, "no operating system" it had windows vista sticker on it. Tried to put vista on it and it gets to where it is finalizing install and either shuts down or gives error message, 0x0000007b, 0xf78d663c, 0xc0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000. Tried the gateway disc and get the same. I had a windows 7 laptop that broke, so as an afterthought I put the hard drive in this laptop and it booted right up. Of course, I keep getting the message that this copy of windows is not genuine which is understandable since it was not intended for this pc. But I'm wondering if it's a hardware issue or a software issue. Any help will be greatly appreciated, and sorry for the long message.