Hi there,
My "new" used Dell from a techy friend had a heart transplant when he brought it to me - he installed a new hard drive after he had it crash on him. Someone gave him a free Mac, so for the cost [$53] I got a much faster machine.
It ran fine for a month or so, but just this past week, when I came in to the office there was a black screen with system info. [He had installed a new wireless mouse from Microsoft two days before - works fine.]
I tried to get it to respond, it would not come back on.My friend was here, we took the box apart and checked connections and sucked out dust.Hmmm.
Finally after fiddling with it for hours ,it did come back to life for my friend, but for no descernable reason.
my techy friend was unable to figure it out, so he said - ' dont turn it off or "sleep" it ', which I used to do.

Two days ago or so I put it in "sleep" and when I tried to start it [with my old mice/mouses'/meeses it used to be that all you would have to do would be to move the mouse and it would "wake up" -not now, you have to hit the start button.] I got a black screen with some system info @ the top and at the bottom:
Primary drive 1 not found.
Strike the F1 key to continue,
F2 to run the setup utility.

Thankfully when I hit F1 it did boot up. I havent turned it off since - not a terrible thing I know [ my friend subscribes to the keep-it-on-all-the-time crowd], but something not right with the state of my Dell.

Still - not what it should be doing, eh?

Any ideas???

Cheers, and thanks for this great format!!!!

Steve

The specs for the Dell are as follows:

Windows: Windows XP5.1 (Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Internet Explorer: 7.0.5700.6
Memory (RAM): 1015 MB
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
CPU Speed: 2784.9 MHz
Sound card: SoundMAX Digital Audio
Display Adapters: Intel(R) 82865G Graphics Controller | NetMeeting driver | RDPDD Chained DD
Screen Resolution: 800 X 600 - 32 bit
:
Network Adapters: Intel(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection - Packet Scheduler Miniport
CD / DVD Drives: D: HL-DT-STCD-RW GCE-8483B | E: TOSHIBA CD/DVDW SD-R5372
:
COM Ports: COM3 | COM1
LPT Ports: LPT1
Mouse: 5 Button Wheel Mouse Present
Hard Disks: C: 74.5GB
Hard Disks - Free: C: 62.2GB
USB Controllers: 4 host controllers.
Firewire (1394): Not Detected
:
Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
Product Make: Dimension 3000
:
AC Power Status: OnLine
BIOS Info: ATAT COMPATIBLE 010506 DELL 8
Time Zone: Eastern Standard Time
Battery: No Battery
Motherboard: Dell Computer Corp. 0N6381
Modem: Intel(R) 537EP V9x DF PCI Modem

Hi and Welcome to PCHF.

I apologize for overlooking your post
We are ususally much faster than this.

Have you tried un/reinstalling the mouse software yet? Something that is designed to 'wake' the PC could perhaps cause some internal software conflicts that prevent it from working. it might not show up until a reboot or a firewall/antivirus update. When ever I get odd problems ...the 1st thing I look at is what I have installed recently.

Thanks for your reply. Yeah, whenever I have a problem I think about what has been changed recently. I'll try a delete/reinstall with the mouse drive and see if that does it. It ran fine for a while with the new mouse, so thats what was perplexilatin' about it. I'll let you know.

Please do...