My old desktop.....

[stoney]

...crapped out about a year ago... the power supply quit, and I didn't bother fixing it. Now I wanted to get it going again, so I went out and bought a power supply and installed it. The computer starts now, but it asks for me to put in a reboot disk. I do that, and it seems to load, but then it just "stalls" and doesn't do anything else. I have very little computer knowledge, so try to keep it simple for me. The operating system is windows XP.



Help me.......

[Bluetoys]

sounds like your internal battery is dead. pop it open and look for a watch battery on the mother board. If it is really old, look for a couple of AA batteries in a holder.

[Bluetoys]

usually though, that would give you a "no bios found" notice, or something like that...

[why_me]

Modern BIOS' will still be found, but the dates and setting will be reset and it may not allow for an operating system to be installed in rare cases. By modern I mean anything that has been put out for the past 5-10 years. Most times, the base settings will aloow an OS to be installed, and most also have a certain set of canned settings for performace and so on. The only thing a dead battery should do is reset the clock and any other custom settings you have applied any time you shut it off.

[stoney]

Well, I put in a new battery with no better results. It asks for a boot up disk, and when I put it in it says "loading ramdisk image". Once this is done, it goes to a blue screen. The cursor moves with the mouse, but nothing else happens. The computer is about 3 years old.

[Geezer-Glide]

If you have the original install disc, try booting off of that. Reinstall XP.

[stoney]

Originally Posted by Geezer-Glide

If you have the original install disc, try booting off of that. Reinstall XP.

I don't have the disk for my computer, but I borrowed one from my daughter. It gets to the user agreement screen and tells me to press F8 to accept....I do that, but nothing else happens. I do have the back up disk for my computer, but it has no effect.

[why_me]

You should be able to just boot off the Windows XP Cd. You may have to go into your BIOS settings (F2 or DEL when you first start the computer) and set the boot device order so that the CDROM is the first in line.

[why_me]

OK....what brand is your computer?

[stoney]

Acer Aspire....512meg ram, pentium 4 processor.

[why_me]

Is the disk you are using from and HP or Dell or something like that?

[stoney]

Yup. The disk is from a Dell.

[why_me]

Dell disks will only work on a Dell system...that is why it is crapping out on you. You need an unbraded disk or an Acer branded disk...which it sounds like you have neither...

[stoney]

I'm on the Acer website, and it looks like I can buy a recovery CD.... guess this is my only option. I have a back up disk that I burned when I got the computer, but it does nothing.

[why_me]

Acers are bad like that...then again, these days, most computers are bad like that. It will certainly be your best bet, I would also think about upgrading your memory as well. 512 MB is pretty low for even just web browsing. I would personally try to bump it up to 2 GB.

If you don't know what kind of memory it takes... www.crucial.com will allow you to do a lookup by brand and model number to see what you need. Memory is cheap these days, and overall will give you the most performance bang for the buck.