While in the BIOS, make sure it is recognizing your hard disk drive! Sounds like your hard disk drive is not working anymore.

You might need to buy a new battery!

This probably means the battery is either dead or not installed properly.

Have you tried using those disks?

Replace motherboard.

You could try replacing the power supply first.

It depends on which updates you installed. At least then you could check out Microsoft's website to see if there are known issues.

Try using a Windows Repair installation with your Windows XP CD....

You may want to try a Windows XP Repair installation. Use your Windows XP CD to boot up. You'll be asked if you want to do a fresh re-install or a repair installation.

Check with Acer support. The flashing light combination may be an error code telling you what is wrong.

CD drives are not hard to replace, but it does require taking apart the computer.

She took it apart...but did she put everythign back? Say, the CPU cooler power wire? If the computer gets too hot...

Perhaps hard drive failure.

Perhaps the power button is broken.

Try it in safe mode? Just a guess.

I had one of those accounts on my computer a while ago. I think it came in when I installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2003.

I deleted mine, and nothing awful happened. If you don't do any ASP.NET...

Sounds like the hard drive may have crashed. You can check the BIOS to see if it detects the drive. If not, you're out of luck.

You could also try rolling the driver back to a time when the driver was working.

Yes, that's probably what happened.