My Windows XP computer got INFECTED with a virus last week. I tried the recovery disk as I did not have important files on the hard drive. My goal was to just restore the hard drive to its original state. The disk would only GET 8% completed so I gave up and installed Freespire. I chose to instal Freespire to the entire drive. Now I'm thinking of buying Windows 7 and overwriting Freespire. Only problem is that I can no longer get to the part of the BOOT menu that says boot from CD. When I turn the comp on, it goes straight to Freespire. Pressing the "f" buttons does not HELP. Can anyone tell me how to clear Freespire off of my drive and install a new operating system?

Lou i tried freespire myself not long ago. i wasn't nuts about it, but it was ok. one nice THING about this situation, you can always go back to that disk if you have to.

i don't know how a windows 7 disk works, but an xp disk boots from the disk and there's a brief window where you have to press any key to boot from cd. it won't stay on that screen and if you were right there paying attention to it, you wouldn't have missed it. it sounds to me like it's not booting from disk at all.
did you by any chance change the bios to make the hard drive the first device in the boot order?

a couple of things that i can think of:

1. your bios is not configured to boot from cd first
2. your cd-rom could be defective/marginal