This is sounding more like a hardware problem. Likely possibilities:

1. CMOS battery died (a cheap fix)
2. Video card or sound card incompatability (or your video card is flaky)
3. Power supply problems
4. Hard disk failure (less likely since you have problems in cmos as well)


>>>It has been a while since this happened so I am out of practice. My main computer has died. (This post is from the Mac). Yesterday I went to check my email and found it unresponsive. I have rebooted it several times and get the same thing every time: Dell logo, Windows XP logo, and then nothing. I could swear I saw an Arabic dialog once, although that is no longer happening. Any resuscitation suggestions?
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>>Press F8 when you are in the screen showing your boot options. If no such screen is shown, add another element to your boot.ini file. Before making things worse copy your disk via linux boot DVD or attach it to another computer - disks are cheap, time is expensive.
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>>Get a boot CD with the HD tools on it - here the magazines have them twice a year. Run the appropriate check for your HD first (sounds ludicrous, but just *testing* made one of my office machines boot again. So the next step was to add a xxCloned partition to have duplicate boot even if it mainly acts as a MSTSC and Outlook client.
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>Thanks for the advice. I will follow it on the new PC ;-( This one sure seems to be toast. I press F2 to go into setup but the screen dies within a couple of seconds. Tomorrow I will get a replacement. My current project is working at home so every day that goes by costs me money.
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>The good news is everything is backed up on an external hard drive. So I think all this will cost me is time. Oh, yeah,also the cost of a new PC....