Lads and lasses, have a real problem. Laptop close to being hurled out the window being followed by a few well chosen profanities. It started with a surprise restart. Then the time spent 'up and running' got less and less, until now I power on, get power to the HD and CD, and ten seconds later, it switches off. One time in 15, I'll get past the BIOS, and even manage to log onto windows (using last known 'good' config) but am never up long enough to manage to do anything diagnostic. My gut says hardware. But results of multiple boots are inconsistent. I'd love to hear that all I have to do is swap pagefile for boot.ini, but am posting here as it is probably not that simple.........for any help, I thank you in advance. Computers will only ever fail you when you need them most....

If it were a desktop I would say clean the heatsink & fan to rectify possible instability from cpu overheat. As I dont know anything about laptop hardware I leave it to someone else to maybe come up with something else

Any beeps at the POST when you can boot to XP? You're probably correct that this is hardware related, check your fan vents to make sure it is spinning and free of dust. Are you powering the laptop through an AC adaptor or the battery when this occurrs?

I did (honest) wander around the forums prior to posting this. I've also... Checked the fan. Cleared any dust from the heat-sink. Taken it apart, and watched the fan working. AND left the machine in a cold part of the house for a whole night, then watched carefully when booting up. Nothing. I presume that if the issue was heat related, then I should have at least got something. For a while anyway. Not being completely green, I have noticed that only twice (in approx 150 attempts to boot) have I had anything resembling a post beep signal. Just the one. I may be wrong, but I think this indicated that my memory has given up the ghost. If it IS memory, it might explain the intermittent results I've been getting (only 1 in 15 boots). So am beginning to think that I need to source a new chip. No wonder they call it DIMM, <sigh> Computers will only ever fail you when you need them most....

STOP PRESS, just noticed the fan is dead on boot.... Computers will only ever fail you when you need them most....

laptop fans can fool you. they only turn on when the system tells them to. Overheating would still let you boot up and post. Same issue if you go into the bios and stay there?

That's the point. I now get just ten seconds of power light, with the hard-drive and the CD spinning, then it shuts down. No BIOS, nothing. Computers will only ever fail you when you need them most....