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..