Okey dokey, Bungleau, no lightning strikes, or power outages (Although there was one a couple weeks back). Intrepid, less than two years old. I'm not at all confident opening it up. [img]tongue.gif[/img] MegaB tried that. Stormy I haven't noticed any beeping, but I don't really pay attention when it starts up. [img]tongue.gif[/img] Felix and everyone else, how do you get into BIOS? Wellard, I left mine for a good 20 minutes without it working.

When you start your computer around the POST (power on self test) there'll be a line at the bottom at the bottom of the screen saying, "press (key) to enter setup" If you press the key you'll be in your bios.

I've never seen that screen come up on my computor.

When it starts up, it beeps once then chunks away a little bit, if that helps any.

Do you nowhere see a line which looks like that? It's on the second screen. The first is video card and RAM IIRC checking and goes really fast then comes the checking for hard disks and CDROM on the second screen.

I've never gotten any screens like that. When it worked, I got the HP screen, then blank for a bit, then the Windows XP screen, that just has the little green bar sliding across (loading), and then the blue Welcome screen, and then I was in. I just get to the HP screen.

Ah yeah, some of them cover the text with a splash screen to make it more 'user friendly'.

Try repeatedly pressing Del or Ctrl F1. There's a third common one, but I've forgotten what it is. One of them is bound to kick you into the bios...

Yes, that's a motherboard setting. You just need to reset the BIOS using the method explained above. Shamrock's right, what he said just might work, but I'm not really sure. Try any of the Fs and the DEL key. Not much damage you can do that way that a restart won't fix.
@ Felix The Assassin - The motherboards are set to discharge all capacitors when a certain time passes without a battery, and that time is almost never longer than 3 minutes, so turning it completely off for 12 hours yields no added results. You don't need to unplug anything but the battery. I would have said you could jump-set the MBO to purge ROMs, but I wouldn't want you switching around the wrong jumper. Anyway, once you get the BIOS reset, you'll be able to enter it normally, and set whatever you like. If we're both online at the time, you can find me on MSN and I'll walk you through the process.

[ 10-17-2004, 12:28 PM: Message edited by: Bozos of Bones ]

Um, neither of those worked.

So next to the HP logo there's nothing else. No checking, sentences even when it worked normally?

Try the escape button as well. IIRC some PCs have that to enter BIOS.