My computer is a Gateway, and when i start it up it goes to the Gateway boot up screen and then windows loads but then theres just a black screen and the mouse cursor.....and i dont know what the problem is???
2007-03-04 15:02:38 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Monitors
Try to boot into safe mode and restore to an earlier point.
While booting, keep pressing the F8 key, then select boot in safe mode. When windows boots, it will ask if you want to continue in safe mode, if not press cancel to do a system restore......
Good luck!
2007-03-04 15:07:47 · answer #1 · answered by Vincent 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Either a RAM wafer went out of commission on you (most likely), Your heatsink and fan are not doing their jobs (moderately likely), or there is a bad boot sector on your hard drive (not likely, but possible).
To fix it, you will need to do the following:
For the RAM issue, open up the case and remove one of the wafers and reboot...if it starts up normally, that's the problem. Try this with both (assuming you have 2 wafers).
For the heat issue, boot into your BIOS (with Gateway, I think you press F1 during initial boot (the period between when your monitor light turns green and the first POST beep), and find PC Health Status or something similar and check the temperature. Anything above 55 degrees Celsius is cause for concern. Make sure that the fan that is seated on top of the heatsink is running. If it is, make sure that there is not a bunch of dust accumulated in the heatsink. Just to be safe, buy a can of compressed air and blow out the heatsink, powersource, and the rest of the guts.
As far as the corrupted boot sector, you may just have to replace the hard drive due to age and reinstall everything.
You can try the Safe Mode reboot (press F8 during initial boot). In the case that works, you may have a virus or other such malware that is interrupting the bootstrap into Windows.
While in the BIOS, reset it to optimized defaults...
My vote is for a fried wafer of RAM.
2007-03-04 23:19:38 · answer #2 · answered by ouroboros0427 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
possibly a bad sector in the ram.... but if its not that... then its a virus or a missing boot file on the hard disk
2007-03-04 23:06:50 · answer #3 · answered by tazewellreddog 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
it might be on safe mode, does it say safe mode in all four corners on the black screen?
2007-03-04 23:08:07 · answer #4 · answered by cowsmoo10 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋