My Compaq Presario V2000 Notebook running Windows XP has been having intermittent problems booting. Some days the computer will successfully boot into Windows, whereas other days the computer just hangs at the ‘Compaq’ screen when the computer is turned-on. There is a white Compaq logo in the centre, and in the bottom left corner there is ‘Press ESC to change boot order’ and underneath ‘Press F10 to enter SETUP, F12 to boot from LAN’. When the computer hangs I have tried all these options, but nothing works! Pressing ESC yields another screen with text and freezes. The text is: “Phoenix NoteBIOS 4.0 Release 6.1 Copyright 1985-2003…639K System RAM Passed, 255M Extended RAM Passed, etc’¦’. One day when the computer did boot properly I was able to press F10 and get into the BIOS setup screen, and I set the BIOS to its default settings but this did not resolve the problem. I have called Compaq tech support but the only solution they can offer is to reinstall Windows. Can you provide any assistance?

From your description of the problem, my opinion is reinstalling Windows is unlikely to do anything to resolve the problem. The computer seems to be hanging during the POST (power-on self-test). This is the stage when the computer BIOS (the basic input output system, which starts the computer before handing control over to the operating system, i.e. Windows) conducts tests of the essential computer hardware to make sure everything is in order. If the computer is hanging during this process, it indicates something is generally either wrong with the BIOS configuration, or there is a hardware fault of some description. Since you have reset the BIOS to default settings, yet the problem remains, this most likely indicates a hardware problem. Unfortunately, since the problem is intermittent this makes it quite difficult to track down the root cause of the problem. Therefore, my suggestion would be to contact Compaq again. This is your best course of action, especially considering the computer is a laptop which would be difficult to fix given the relatively specialised nature of most laptop parts.