Help setting up a refurbished Dell laptop

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I am setting up a refurbished Dell D600 Latitude laptop for my daughter. Before I hand it over I am trying to prepare for disaster!

It came with XP Pro SP1 onboard, and a version of Norton Ghost. DVD/CDRW drive. No floppy drive. It has an Ethernet port and wireless card and I have added it successfully to my home network. One partition and no evidence of a recovery partition. I am required to make my own recovery images using Ghost which I am in the process of doing. I have updated the XP Pro to SP2 and subsequent updates, and installed Norton AV (free from my ISP), ZA free, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, and will be putting Open Office, along with antispyware and Mailwasher.

I also have a bootable BootItNG CD made for my XP Home desktop and am hoping to use it to create an extra partition on the laptop HDD to give me somewhere to put future backup image files of C:\ so I can then easily move them onto my home wireless network in a Windows environment. In the windows mode I have full (Windows) network transferability between the two computers, and I have a folder on my desktop mapped as a Z drive on the laptop to facilitate any transfers or even Ghost working over the network. Everything can see everything on the network.

But - a number of problems I would like some advice on please.

I would like if possible to try and create a hard copy of the XP Pro OS slipstreamed with SP2 but the methods I have researched rely on the laptop having a C:/I386 folder which this one doesn't have - there are a number of small i386 folders dotted around the C:\ partition but they don't have the sort of files I would expect on a Windows CD. Any other way of getting an OS copy out of this machine please?

How can I create a bootable CD to use on the laptop with Ghost for restore? It only offers options of making a bootable floppy and there is no floppy drive? To make a bootable CD it asks for a Win98 type rescue floppy - but of course there is no floppy drive! Should the worst case crash scenario occur then I would not be able to boot from the HDD and use the normal Ghost interface.

Finally - the instructions for networking under the Ghost PC-DOS environment have totally defeated me. Can this be done using ethernet or wireless or do I have to use usb? And how do I locate the relevant drivers for use in the Ghost PC-DOS environment?

Apologies if this isn't the best group - redirection instructions willingly accepted. This is the first time I've worked with a laptop and with a pre-installed OS - normally I build my own desktop machine and install OEM OS from scratch.

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