my daughter just managed a weird problem on the computer, it seems to be in a permanent sleep mode of some sort, after the boot up screen the screen goes black and the monitor light just flashes, and nothing I do will get the monitor to turn on again I've already went into bios and set it all back to default, and made sure no power settings were causing this if anyone has any suggestion, please send me a message thanks

Hi Vanilla, I doubt this is a sleep mode problem, it sounds more like a boot-up problem. Do you have a Win98 boot disk handy? If not, do you know how to create one? If nothing else, you can download a program which will create a bootdisk for you from http://www.bootdisk.com. If you DO have a boot disk, go into the CMOS, and set the system to boot from the floppy drive first. Then save your settings and re-boot with the floppy in the drive. You do NOT need CD-ROM support for this, so you'll save a minute or two by choosing Option 2, Boot Without CD-ROM Support. Once you're at the A: prompt, which will look like this: A:\> type this EXACTLY (WITHOUT the quotes): "SYS C:" Once you see the message "System Files Transferred", you can remove the floppy disk, re-boot the system, and (hopefully) you'll be able to boot into Windows again. If all goes well, go back into the CMOS settings, and change the system to boot from the hard drive, save your settings, and exit. If you STILL can't boot into Windows, please write down any error messages you see, and post them here. Good luck, Vanilla; we'll be waiting to see how things turn out. Pete

could be a bad power supply i have had some folks 'wiggle ' the monitor connector while connecting the monitor to the video card, and unseat the video card. if your computer has integrated video, then disregard that option monitor could be bad. try another if you can

well, I seem to have it sorted now, I booted up in safe mode, and set the screensaver to None, and turned off all power management 'crap' then rebooted, and it seems ok now seems a harry potter screensaver is the cause of all this mess :-\

Hi again, Vanilla, I might have misunderstood your original post; when you mentioned the monitor light flashing, I thought you meant a cursor flashing on the monitor, but if you were referring to the monitor POWER light flashing, then I have to agree with kkk that this seems like a HARDWARE problem. The monitor cable could be loose to the back of the computer, or the power supply could be failing, but most likely the problem is a video card that is not fully seated in the slot. My suggestion was related to the fact that you said that you went into the "BIOS" (actually, the CMOS settings), and reset everything to the default settings. That makes me think that you DON'T have a video problem (otherwise, how could you get into the CMOS?), and that my original post still applies here. It is ALSO possible, though somewhat less likely, that you have BOTH problems at once, with the monitor / video card problem following the boot-up problem (possibly while you were trying to get things working again). Please clarify this, so we can help you resolve this, and (maybe) help your daughter escape the dog house. Thanks HTH Pete