yes sorry Nodge, i just wasnt confident going down to him teaching him how to suck eggs, so i found a bit of info about the adjustment, printed it off and handed him. As i say i'm on good terms with him but thankyou as always for pointing me in the right direction. will follow up once i have it back

Be aware that if the 2nd hand box came out of a pre 2004ish car the gear box will have different internals and will require an earlier model TCM to drive it correctly.
This is doubtful as the earlier box has more pins on one of the connectors, but some may just give the plug a firmer push bending the pins if they're unaware.
Hopefully it's just the cable is misaligned.
Mike

well it now goes into sport mode when slid over so thanks Nodge for pointing me to that. However F4 flashes up still.

i seem to find it happens only as soon as you go into 4th gear, if i turn car off and on then it goes away and doesnt come on again until 4th gear . Now i must say it still drives and changes gear even with this F4 on, it wont let you manually shift though if f4 is on. There is no loss of power either. My mechanic would'nt have the landrover diagnostics to plug in as i understand only really the landrover specific mechancis would have these due to cost? is that correct?

below video of it driving / changing gears 0-100 in controlled environment of course. apologies for it being sideways

Did you check the year of the autobox?
As stated, they changed internal components. Early boxes have intermediate speed sensors, later post 2004 don't. This will confuse the TCM, and your F4 will become more frequent, eventually triggering limp mode.
F4 is quite a generic code for the autobox and can be due to many things:
Connectors misaligned or loose.
Selector cable misaligned
Low ATF level
Fault on the canbus wiring
Wrong TCM installed
Faulty solenoid
Unfortunately, even a full on land rover code reader doesn't always pull up the correct fault code if the fault is in the canbus wiring, been there, done that!
Mike

thanks mike. im waiting on a reply, the picture in the add shows the engine bay which looks exactly like mine . mine is a december 2003 so is the start of the facelift model. does this title indicate year at all ? im surprised i forgot to ask which year .
LAND ROVER FREELANDER 2.0 TD4 204D3 110HP AUTOMATIC GEARBOX.

There is a code on the gearbox that denotes which one it is. I wouldn't like to guess as yours is the swap over year.
I believe bell engineering have the information on their website, but it's a while since I checked.
Although the facelifts are 110Hp and pre-facelift are 112Hp, so it would suggest yours is the later model, but that doesn't mean they weren't using up old stock of the autobox.
It's all a tad confusing unfortunately.
Mike