Hi. I visit my 81 year old father once or twice a year and always try to clean up his computer and get it running better. I delete all the strange things that he "doesn't know" how they got installed.. and run a registry cleaner... (can't remember the which one, not with him now). Well after uninstalling the programs and running the cleaner then rebooting, on start up we get the initial screen on the monitor and nothing else happens. For the most part on the gateway is is just a black screen with "gateway" on it and a note to press F2 or F10 for bios or ???. Anyway nothing happens and neither F2 or F10 does anything. The keyboard seems to have power and we unplug it and plug it in and see the green lights flash. I hear a sound which i think is the hard drive, but it sounds a bit louder than when the computer was running. Tried unplugging it. Tried restarting several times. It just hangs on that first screen. During a normal boot there would normally be a little flashing cursor or something like that in the upper left of the screen and that is not happening.

I read a few things and could a dirty stopped fan cause the hang? I haven't looked inside the case yet.

Could the registry clean have done this?

We can't find any sort of xp reinstall cd.. I might have found a win 98 reinstall cd but that didn't seem to do anything in the cd reader.

Any help is greatly appreciated..

Registry cleaners if used improperly can delete parts of the registry.

That model was one of the first to be shipped with the D: recovery partition. Pressing F11 at the start up should start the recovery process.

You may wish to google this for more specific instructions.

Registry cleaners if used improperly can delete parts of the registry.

That model was one of the first to be shipped with the D: recovery partition. Pressing F11 at the start up should start the recovery process.

You may wish to google this for more specific instructions.

I will try hitting f11 when i go back today, but it seems the f11 prompt only comes up after the computer POST operation. This computer is dead to the world as soon as one sees the very first screen with GATEWAY on it (and F2/F10 text).

Any other suggestions from anyone out there?

Just talked with my father on the phone. He said the computer has magically started up. Who knows what the problem was, but happy it wasn't a problem with the registry cleaning. (I've never had a problem with basic automatic registry cleaning)
I wonder if it was overheated.
Thanks
R:)

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