Hello all,
This is my first post and a long story, but please persevere with me.
I bought a Dell Dimension 5000 3yrs ago for my teenage grand-sons and although you can expect problems with them surfing, this one is a bad'un. The PC is in good physical condition and there aren't any obvious problems inside the case.
Here is the problem:
When I boot up in the normal manner it goes to the screen were it asks the user if they want to enter setup or press F1 to continue. It then takes a half hour to get to the desktop where there are three accounts. When I click on one, it takes another 20 mins or so to get to the users screen, but it only contains the Windows XP background. NO ICONS, NO START BUTTON, SYSTEM TRAY.
I can't close the PC in the usual way or go Ctrl+Alt+Delete to shut it down. I can't access the Control Panel or RUN.
I have tried to reinstall, factory settings with F12, but that was futile. F8 or delete at start up won't take me to SAFE MODE.
F11 doesn't do the factory default settings either.
I have tried the Extended Diagnostic feature but it turned up clear.
I finally decided to sacrifice the personal files and created an Fdisk to reformat the HDD. As the PC doesn't have an internal floppy drive I used a USB external one, but it wasn't recognized.
If anyone can help me I'd very much appreciate it.
Thanks for reading and all help will be gratefully received.
Tom
This is my first post and a long story, but please persevere with me.
I bought a Dell Dimension 5000 3yrs ago for my teenage grand-sons and although you can expect problems with them surfing, this one is a bad'un. The PC is in good physical condition and there aren't any obvious problems inside the case.
Here is the problem:
When I boot up in the normal manner it goes to the screen were it asks the user if they want to enter setup or press F1 to continue. It then takes a half hour to get to the desktop where there are three accounts. When I click on one, it takes another 20 mins or so to get to the users screen, but it only contains the Windows XP background. NO ICONS, NO START BUTTON, SYSTEM TRAY.
I can't close the PC in the usual way or go Ctrl+Alt+Delete to shut it down. I can't access the Control Panel or RUN.
I have tried to reinstall, factory settings with F12, but that was futile. F8 or delete at start up won't take me to SAFE MODE.
F11 doesn't do the factory default settings either.
I have tried the Extended Diagnostic feature but it turned up clear.
I finally decided to sacrifice the personal files and created an Fdisk to reformat the HDD. As the PC doesn't have an internal floppy drive I used a USB external one, but it wasn't recognized.
If anyone can help me I'd very much appreciate it.
Thanks for reading and all help will be gratefully received.
Tom