PC Problem...

[Buffalobiian]

My Dell Inspiron 1501 failed to boot this morning. I get through the first (and only) page of bios, and when it's meant to load the windows XP logo, it instead flashes grey/white for 0.5 seconds, and just keeps rebooting over and over in the same cycle.

I'm going to try my backup disk, but since the CD reader tends to pick up errors, I would prefer it as a last resort - unless I copy the disks to an external HDD and run the backup from there.

It's been working fine for a few months now. The only thing I can remember I did yesterday was uninstall the graphics drivers and upgrade to 9.2 for the ATI 1150? onboard card.

I've recently been switching to using hibernation and standby modes a lot more (in the past week), but that's it. I'll post some pics later when I get back home, since I'm at uni.

Currently running the PSA + Pre-boot Assessment/memtest - so far so good. Completed with no errors...

Interestingly though, during the normal boot-memory-test, the numbers climb up to ~6GB of ram, but then settles on 4GB - OK. I can't remember if it's always like this or not, but I'm pretty sure I've only got 4GB of ram.

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Weird. I went into bios -> selected "Load default settings", then changed the setting for "show boot-diagnostic screen" from "default - off" to "on", and it worked....?

Anyway, running chkdsk /r and defrag just for health's sake.

It was coming back from hibernation btw.