Sorry, I had to.
Post the make, model, age and if you installed any new hardware or software recently. What were you doing on it the last time it was working?
Original battery?
If you turn off the computer and then turn it back on - start pressing the “F” keys [usually F2, F8, F10, or F12] as soon as it starts up. You can press them randomly as it boots up.
One of these keys is going to get you to the Startup Routine. Then, boot up in Safe Mode. Once in Safe Mode, got to Start, Help and Support, then undo changes using System Restore.
Pick a date before your computer started futzing up ...
techping.
just a guess with little to go on..
this is a low battery. Even when plugged into the wall some laptops won’t boot with a low or bad battery. Let in charge a while or remove battery and try to boot,
Pay your local computer store 50 bucks to fix it for you and save yourself hours/days of aggravation and frustration.
Any error messages at all?
Any external devices plugged in? If so, unplug them, and boot it up again to see what happens.
HD crash
If you’re getting a blinking cursor, you’re not booting into Windows. It’s likely a hard drive issue, although it may be a motherboard issue.
Watch your BIOS during boot up. The computer may not see the C: drive. I’ve been having a similar issue with one of my computers. It’s a BIOS issue on the motherboard.
If you can get into BIOS (press Del, F keys, Ins, or whatever your computer needs) then there may be tests inside that you can run. If you do, make sure you don't select a destructive test (with write on HDD.)
One simple test would be to stick a bootable CD or DVD into the drive and restart the laptop. If it boots from the disk and talks to you then you should be fairly sure that your Windows committed harakiri and you need to reinstall. If your backups are recent and good then it's not a problem. If you don't know what a backup is ... then you need some local help from a competent tech. It will involve, probably, booting Linux off of a DVD, loading the NTFS driver and copying your data over the network or USB.
Ah, here you go
HP has this issue, sounds quite common
If you have access to another computer, with high speed internet, download and burn a Linux live CD. You can then
try to boot the laptop with the live CD to see if its a problem with Windoze or if its a real hardware gremlin.
Got to Distrowatch.com and look in the right column for Linux live CD downloads. Use your cd/dvd burn app to burn the Image.
It will be an .iso file and probably about 700MB. Be sure to download a “32 bit” file.
Try Mint. It boots on my Toshiba laptop. Good luck.
Smash the frikin thing and get a new one that works.
Christmas is coming.
“I was doing a virus scan which was nothing out of the norm.”
The antivirus program may have quarantined a system file.
For example:
http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1626911&page=1
Sorry, I had to.
Sounds like the hard drive has totally crashed. Could be that there’s nothing left to do but replace the failed drive.
Do you even see any of the BIOS pre- boot stuff? if you do... and if this is an older drive that hasn’t gotten a lot of use lately... there’s a chance (a way outside chance) that your problem is “sticktion”. It could be that the hard drive lube is all gunked up, and the motor can’t get it to spin. If nothing else is working anyway... try picking up the computer about a foot off the table and just drop it. Then see if it boots up after that.
No promises... :-)
Wait, I have to find the obligatory picture.
I’ll get back to you.
just real quick without seeing it.
Battery or fouled hard drive?
And it won’t allow you to use the F keys? My daughter’s did this earlier this week so it’s in the shop. Just before it went black a pop-up window appeared that was from a website she’d never seen or heard of before. She clicked on it to close it and...well it faded to black and stayed there.
Sounded like some kind of virus,worm, malware....whatever.
BTW - are you using AVG 9 or higher anti-virus ???
Reason I ask is that when they went to version 9, my ‘puter started chokin’ [CPU hog} ...
Had to get rid of AVG in favor of Antivir ...
Also heard that AVG 10 has been causing probs for people ...