i bought an HP a705w from a friend that was "hit" by a storm last month . he said it wouldnt boot up so i bought the case, MB , hard drive , and CPU (2.9 Celeron) it has the original windows on the drive..well i have it booting into safe mode but not with the mouse attached. wont boot into normal windows either way with or without mouse. last week HP released a bios update and i thought that might help so i flashed it but it is still doing the same thing. when it gets to the bios screen where it detects drives and ram etc.. it says "bios defaults have been loaded due to a bios flash or checksum error" and i cant get that message to go away. i followed Hp instructions but nothing. by the way the bios flash was an "in windows" flash and it wouldnt let me into windows i put another drive in and loaded 2000 pro (without the mouse) and flashed in 2000. has anyone ever seen this problem and if so is it fixable? or should i salvage what i can and toss the rest? the Celeron was tested in another pc and is fine. and i have run the HP system recovery on the hard drive so it is a fresh windows. ram was also tested in another pc and is fine. all i can see is the bios is the problem but im lost at this point. also was tested with another power supply. can anyone help?

Try replacing the motherboard battery.

Take the mb to a recycle place. You can't tell if the darn thing will one day catch fire. What is that worth? I think some 50,000 is more than that board will stand.