Acer Aspire IV (Windows Eight) about 3 years old won’t boot up properly gets so far and then freezes and I have to switch the power off. It started operating slowly over the w/e so I used the refresh tool in the recovery options which seemed to improve matters for a while.

As I can’t seem to find anywhere to quirt WD40 in any meaningful way and it doesn’t have H and L or B screws I’m now lost. Is there anything I can try or is it down to PC World for repair/scrapping.

Boot from recovery media? USB or DVD to see if it does then back up everything and try a reinstall?

I think Acer laptops have a recovery partition in them….

Apparently you press Alt & keep hitting F10 when you start it to enter the recovery partition….this will restore it to how it came out of the factory.

I think you will lose all data on the laptop, so this is a last resort, even if you have a back-up.

Have you tried boot in safe mode? I think that is normally hit f8 repeatedly on start-up.

won’t boot up properly gets so far and then freezes

How far is “so far”?

Could be a failing hard disk. I would try booting from a recovery disk then running disk check.

Could just be software rather than physical, but yes, the same procedure would apply.

Is it W8 or W8.1?

Sometimes it won’t let me get past the log in page and then sometimes it will get to the normal screen but not allow any of the applications to run when you click an icon.

I think it is windows 8.1.

It’s not failing to boot then, it’s booting up just fine.

Can you bring it up in Safe Mode?
https://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-8-the-easy-way/

Thanks for that link Cougar – I’ll give that a go.

If you don’t have a current back up then try a Linux download, boot from that and run it as a Live CD. It’ll hopefully allow you to copy your files (unless it’s an encrypted hard drive) to an external drive

The hard drive makers often have a bootable piece of software on their website to tell you if the drive is failing