It turns on, i get the ctrl,alt delete box which i do but then it just freezes with a blue screen and won't do anything else. I've tried turning it off and on a few times, taking battery & memory out and back in but nothing.

I can get to the setup menu's but i don't know what i'm looking at really?

ta

Can you get it boot into safe mode? (Press F8 when booting until you get the startup menu)

i get to the start up menu, not tried safe mode start up (i'm round at my neighbours at the mo on their pc so i'll pop back and try)

well i got a bit further, i got to safe mode, ctrl, alt delete, went to the password box, enter but it's no stuck with the "loading your personal settings" box??

I you can get it to boot i safe mode then do a system restore. Set the system back to when it was last running ok. Say a week or two. That ahould do the trick. Failing that have you got a back up disk for the os.?

sounds like your hard drive could be screwed, or at least those are the exact same symptoms mine displayed when mine died. i would recommend getting the drive out, mounting it in a caddy and getting whatever off it you can, before doing anything else/replacing it.

I had something similar last week. We – by that I mean Peter next door – finished up by wiping every single thing from the hard drive using some special utility he downloaded from somewhere. Hard drive had nothing at all on it. Had to rebuild from scratch, re partition, install all the hidden techy bits that only anoraks know about, then put all the drivers back on. Only then could Windows go back on. Seems like hard drive had become corrupted way down deep in the works. Peter reckoned that a repair shop would have just ditched the drive and sold me a new one. Saved me a small fortune. In fact if it had gone to a shop it would probably have been more economical to ditch it and buy a new one.

You could do with finding a Peter!!!