Well it happened today, thanks to my stupid minidisc player. I tried to plug it in it was doing all the plug & play stuff trying to load drivers. It was looking for a special driver and wanted the windows 98 cd. It kept freaking out so I hit cancel and tried to check email. It gave me that but then the keyboard locked while the win 98 disc menu was up. I tried a hard boot, the screen loaded the HP intro, then went blank and beeped one long beep, pause, 2 long beeps and 3-4 short beeps. It displays 2 characters but you can only see HALF of them, so I'm not sure if it's saying Q4 or 04. That's as far as it goes. Can you please share some advice and see if I can revive this thing without having to take it in somewhere? Thanks for any help.

The Abnormal BIOS Beeps indicate BIOS setup is some how corrupted by your bothched "Mini Disc player" Installation. Enter the BIOS setup by pressing the approriate key Example:[F1] In the main menu make sure the YYYY, MM/DD and time are all OK. If not correct them and Save the changes and Exit by pressing F-10 and ENTER keys. If Year, Month & date are OK in the BIOS, copy the current settings under each of the menu on paper and then press the appropriate key(s) shown there to Restore Defaults [like F5 or F6] Save changes & Exit to see if PC will reboot OK. If problem persists, please post details about your machine (Model # of HP Pavilion) and the Mini Disk Player

A little history on the H.P. Pavilion. They'er not crap but close. They come with a 185 watt power supply that is bad from the factory. The voltage slowly drops and any additions that didn't come with the computer will make it go nuts,lock,freeze,not see the floppy,fail to read hard disk info,make the key board print what ever it wants. I think you get the picture. I know what your thinking but trust me, i have 7 of them in my scrap pile and one is an 800 with 256ram. Proprietory power supply. worth more than the computer. Hint, Don't use a " no name " to replace the power supply, not a good plan. Good luck. computer solutions