hi I'm new to this group and I am looking for some help with my windows vista. I'm just back from two week holiday during which time the pc was switched off. I've tried starting up numerous times today and it just goes to blue screen and freezes. It won't let me into safe mode(it just freezes there too). I've tried the system repair and when it runs through this process and restarts it just freezes on a blue screen after I put in my password. It generrally seems very slow and worryingly I can't actrually hear the hard disk spin up.
Please help. I've a big job to get underway tomorrow and most of the files are on my system.....unfortunately some not backed up!!!

Just ran the hardware diagnostic tools.
Reports that Hard Drive Failed the Short Self Test everything else reports normal/passed. I don't know what this means??

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This means your Hard drive is Damaged (I would have guessed from the symptoms in the first paragraph) If you have another computer you could put it in to try to transfer files, I'd try that. If you're not comfortable with that or don't have a second system go to a friend who knows computers or a local computer shop.

Hopefully this would just be a matter of hooking the Hard Drive to another computer and transferring the files to a new drive, but if it wont spin up at all it would require hardware level data recovery which is very expensive (hundreds of dollars) and not worth doing unless the files are very important to you.

I have a new Dell XPS laptop that is loaded. This laptop is 4 months old and been nothing but problems. It has never worked right. It freezes up surfing the net,and using things like Microsoft word.Forget using u-tube or shopping on e-bay because it is laggs of hell.A geek co-worker friend said that it is most likely Vista that is the culprit. The only OS I ever knew was XP because I got my first machine around 2001 or 2002. I have a old desktop on XP that runs circles around this new Dell XPS. Well, I have freinds who come over with 600$ HP's that run circles around my fancy new Dell. I

I have a new Dell XPS laptop that is loaded. This laptop is 4 months old and been nothing but problems. It has never worked right. It freezes up surfing the net,and using things like Microsoft word.Forget using u-tube or shopping on e-bay because it is laggs of hell.A geek co-worker friend said that it is most likely Vista that is the culprit. The only OS I ever knew was XP because I got my first machine around 2001 or 2002. Dell will not fix it ,and they have worn me down.I have 2 year warrenty tech support etc that cost several hundered dollars,but they just send a guy to change parts. I actually have a frankinstein laptop,because it has been taken apart and worked on so many times.I ask the tech guy,"can't you just fix the problem,instead of just changing parts and leaving".

Is there a dell restore disk?

If the OS is corrupted, or their is something wrong with the install, the disk should let you start from scratch.

PS, you'd probably have better luck creating your ow thread, since this one has pretty much run it's course.

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