I have been experiencing boot up problems with my PC. For the past few months it has been acting wierd (slow to boot up and respond, etc) and two weeks ago it would only boot up in safe mode. I tried to uninstall unnecessary programs and that didn't help. I tried all the normal disk cleanup and defrags, still nothing. I was able to restore to an earlier time but during the restart, the PC would hang at the XP logo screen. I have tried the full system recovery (both types) and have tried to recover using the recovery disks I made. Now the PC hangs at the XP logo screen and says "please wait." Well I have been waiting for two days and still nothing. Any suggestions? BTW, I don't have an XP disk, it was pre-installed.

Hello Vkscott,

If you have done a full format and restore of your operating system and right off the bat you have problems booting up, then most likely it is a result of a bad restore or hardware problems. Bad restore meaning, the disks you used may have corrupted files and the restore didn't copy every file correctly.

First I would try running Memtest86 to check your computer for memory errors. It is a free download (click on my link). Just burn the ISO to a disc then boot to it, it will start automatically.

The next thing I would try is a hard drive diagnostic. Pretty much every hard drive manufacturer has a free diagnostic tool you can download from their website. Open your case, find your hard drive manufacturer, download their diagnostic tool, and follow the instructions on how to run it.

After you finish those tests, let me know what the results were.

Hope that helps!

I hope I saved the right file Download - Memtest86 v3.3 ISO image (zip) to my laptop to put on a CD. BTW, do I need to do the pre work for every problem or just once? I am very new to the help forum and just learned how to spell PC last week Thanks

Thanks

The Prework will check if the problem you are having is due to malware, or something else.

If you already have the programs in the Prework, you may wish to run a scan with them once in a while. If there are any issues detected, well, we are here aren't we?

You wouldn't need to do the pre-work if you haven't even been able to get into Windows since you restored your OS. Nor could you do it anyway since you can't get into Windows...