I have a laptop that came with XP. I have been using it since January with no issues. I recently loaded The Sims on it and played for two days without a problem. The game ran fine and so did the computer. I went to boot it up and now it just hangs on the blue Windows XP screen. I can't get into safe mode or safe mode with command prompt. It seems totally locked up. Any suggestions before I use the recovery disk and start from scratch? Obviously, I would really like to not have do that. TIA

my brother had a similar problem with his dell laptop on xp. the computer seemed to lock up while booting (screen went completely black), but after a few minutes, it would continue to boot as normal. the trouble was that for some reason windows wasn't correctly detecting his cd drive, and was repeatedly querying it because it expected it to be there. he had to reinstall xp to fix it. try leaving it for 2-5 minutes next time you boot up, see if it's just having issues with some hardware.

Thanks for your reply, but I have left it as long as 30 minutes and it hasn't responded. I just can't believe that I can't get into safe mode, that has never happened before on any computer that I have used.