For about 4 days now my PC has been having boot up problems, it starts to boot then it seems like it re-sets, starts again, blah, sometimes it takes about 3-4 mins to finally start up. its as stable as it was before once its actually booted up, has anyone got any ideas as to wtf is going on? i.e hardware or bios?

i blame the gf..

The same happened to me some time ago with my POS pc under Win ME.

Partly solved it by installing WinXP on it.

Youve probably got some kind of nasty software bug on the loose. Best thing to do, is what i always do when i am unsure...

Format 'n' Reinstall your HD.

How far does it get in the boot process? To the point where it's booting windows, or before then? Try to be as specific as you can please.

sometimes it gets as far as the (spit) Packard bell screen, sometimes not even as far as that. most of the time it only gets about 1 or 2 seconds into the process. If it gets as far as the windows screen then its always ok.

man, i don't wanna format, you know what PC world are like, you don't get a windows disk with your PC. like fuck am i ever dealing with them again.

Agrees that PC world a wankers. Hmmm, at first I'd a said it could be a faulty connection somewhere, but you say that it's ok once it's up and running.

Try the obvious - virus scanners and what ever, google around some too. Maybe one of you device's (floppy, CD ROM, HDD) is faulty? Try changing your boot order, and see if it takes longer before it resets. Could quite litteraly be as simple as kicking your comp to shift a connection back in to place.

took all the wires off and checked them, etc, and put it back together, still the same.

It's doing it before the software takes over, so you've got a problem with hardware somewhere. Either a BIOS setting is bad or a piece of hardware is going bad.

First thing I'd recommend is going into the BIOS and setting at the defaults, or the safe defaults, or whatever, and seeing if that fixes it. Probably won't, but it's worth a shot.

If not, it's probably a piece of hardware failing. You said it's fine if it manages to get into Windows? That's really odd. It won't be RAM, not would it be the HD or really any other peripheral. At this point, I'd say there might actually be something wrong with the motherboard, something about the CMOS or something is screwed up.

Have you checked to see if there are any BIOS updates out there? That may help.

Oh, and Packard Bell is the shits. Blech. They're worse than e-machines.

I say

Heat

or

Power

mmm...its all over my head

my gf wants me to take it into PC world and let them sort it out. like fuck, probably get busted for (regular i hasten to add) porn on my HD

This is what you do.

Take out everything in your computer. Disconnect your cd rom, your hard drive your sound card your floppy your network card. All that. Leave in your video. Only have your video, memory, and processor in your pc. Then try and turn in on. If you still get nothing then re seat your memory and video card. Try again. If you still get nothing you need to try different memory or a different power supply. If it still doesnt boot with different memory or power supply then your left with either a motherboard problem or a bad chip. Depending on what type of motherboard you got and if you got a AMD will determine which one to try first. If you dont have those spare parts laying around then youll have to take it in to .... Pc world

you can do that, which would narrow it down to video card, memory, cpu, and motherboard (maybe power supply).

But it doesn't freeze up in Windows (or do anything else stupid).

Windows is very sensitive to memory problems. So, if Windows is ok once everything boots, it can't be memory.

Is there any video corruption? A dying video card will typically make your display act stupid. Wierd characters displaying, colors showing wrong, color bleeding into each other, artifacts on the screen, etc. If you don't have this, it's probably not the video card.

CPU. If there are major CPU issues, windows will crash constantly. Probably not CPU-related.

Leaving motherboard and power supply.

Or pc world.

lol.

my CD writer is a suspect, i'm gonna disconect it and see what happens. i'll let you know what goes on.

Its annoying how crap computers actually are.

Hail to the Windows

HAIL to packard bell.