Hello, last night while my dad was browsing Internet Explorer for automotive books on mum's Acer 5536G Laptop, which runs on Windows Vista Home Premium, an alert came up in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen reading something along the lines of "Your Computer is Being Attacked". Dad clicked "Block Attack", then open the spyware (Windows Security Centre) and it said that 42 threats were found, and at least one was a 'Trojan'. However, the McAfee spyware did not detect anything. Dad restarted the computer, but it would not reboot. The message reads "Operating System Not Found". All that comes up is the Acer start-up screen in a continuous loop. The only option available is to press F2 to access the BIOS menu. Does anybody know what we should do? This computer is mainly only used for running offline games such as the Sims 2 (with all expansion packs), and occaisionally Spider Solitare, and occaisional web-browsing and internet banking. Can anybody please help?

Try Dr.Web live CD , It's Linux based and scans independently , On a clean computer d\l the ISO , burn as an ISO , boot from the disc and run the scan . http://www.freedrweb.com/livecd/ ...................

This message will be prompted as: the harddisk can not be found - check your bios the harddisk had hardware problems - the MBR on your disk is corrupt - boot.ini points to wrong partition - The best thing you can do is get yourself a bootable CD with Winternals on it This is a tool that gives you the opportunity to access your computer whilst booting from this CD. There are several repair tools on this disk. Google on this tools or find a download thru Torrent or P2P WINTERNALS

Iv'e just noticed that you have Vista in that case I think you need to do a start-up repair ,From a disc , this tutorial from bleeping computers explains how http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tut... You may also not have a Full install disk , so this will do . http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windo... Nb. you do not need to use a torrent downloader for this disc just double click on the down loaded link and select the browser of choice . Some people have reported problems when they have burned this disk with Nero , I have had no problems with Vista's burner or Cdburnerxp , just slow the burn speed down a bit , If start-up repair does not do it for you try system restore . A repair from a disc will work when sometimes it does not from a HDD .