Start up problem

I've been asked by an elderly friend to help with a problem occurring when booting her PC.

When she switches it on she gets screens full of unintelligible stuff (to her anyway) among which she quoted to me "Award modular bios b6.00pg" "an" or "on" "Energy star ". This sound to me like a monitor problem. She did say that she'd been dusting and had moved it, so I will check for loose connections first. But it must be loading somethig for there to be any text on the screen.

It's a pretty standard desktop (maybe a Dell?) with Window XP home, but is not at present going as far as loading Windows.

I haven't seen it yet and am visiting her later. Any thoughts on where I might start?

 

It is booting into (or stopping at) the computer's BIOS settings. It is an Award BIOS. There will be an "Energy Star" logo.

It has gone into the BIOS/Startup settings.

moved...

I think a connection may have come loose. You will need to (or get someone else) to reseat the connections of all the modular connectors...drives, graphics(AGP), PCI and RAM.

The dust may have clogged the heatsink fins of the microchip's heat dispersers. It could be overheating.

Matt

 

Thanks for your help. I visited her yesterday and found the message "Warning!! Some changes in chipset or clock setting caused boot failures. Defaults for these setting have been loaded. Press F1 to continue" - so I did that. Windows loaded and all appeared to be normal. Switched it off and rebooted and the message did not appear and all is working normally.

As a result I've added to my totally unjustified reputation for being able to work miracle cures! As I'm sure you know switching off and on again fixes many things, and people think you've got a magic wand.

So I think we can consider this issue to be closed.