[thechat] Laptop Woes

[Luther, Ron]

Hi Gang,


Luddite Ron begging for tech support again!

It's my son's laptop.  It's about a 3 year old Compaq 
running Windows XP.  I would really like it to last 
another year to finish his undergrad work at OSU.  
Then we can think about a new one for grad school.

It's not booting up cleanly.  If he hits escape 
while the laptop is booting, then F1, he can 
kinda sorta get the box halfway working.

'Recovery' didn't.

Tried format and a reinstall of XP.  The machine 
seems to make it to a point where it needs to 
reboot itself - then drifts off into never never 
land.

Is this sounding like a hardware issue?  Maybe the 
boot sector on the hard drive is fried?

Are there other things I should be trying?  Or do 
I need to run out and get a new hard drive for a 
fresh XP install?


Thanks!!
RonL.