Im in trouble, my comrades. My old PC doesn't boot. I mean it alsmot does; it gets to the point when the Windows Professional picture and "Starting up" message is displayed on the screen. It stays like that for a about 5 seconds and then reboots. It doesn not boot in safemode or any other modes. Also, I can't find my recovery cd. s6olaev

Have you called Dell support yet about this? If you had a normal OEM version of your operating system you could likely do a repair of the OS. However, with recovery CD's, this is likely not an option as they are rather proprietary by design. If you have important data you don't want to lose, I highly recommned removing the drive, slaving it into another 2000 or XP based PC and then copying the important data over and burning it to CD or DVD. If you can get your hands on a normal copy of 2000, try a recovery but don't hold your breath.....brand names tend to be very proprietary and chances are you won't be able to fix it.....but it IS worth a try. At the very least, you may get it to run well enough to backup the important data you don't want to lose. In the end, if a recovery doesn't work, once you've backed up your data, you'll likely have to purchase recovery CD's from Dell and reinstall your PC from scratch.

It may be the Motherboard. Open the machine and look at the small capacitors around the motherboard. If there is a brownish substance on top of the or they are bulging, most likely this is your problem. The capacitors are blue in color and have writing on them with the numbers 2200 (microfarads)