Quote - Acadia! it's Ariana here....you know the Dell from Hell owner! LOL! Look...can you e-mail me and I will give you my personal mail or phone. I have a tech friend who is willing to trouble shoot this and it should work. You know I wouldn't steer you wrong. And the Dell tech's up in Canada are great, IF you have your warenty intact. You don't need a motherboard, it is most like massive log in error/ worm....suggestion, can you start in safe mode and go to Microsoft and do the deep virus scan? It takes Foreveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer. But it might find the problem, once identified the fix is usually quick and painless. Lesson. Have a back up Dinosaur Desk Top!  I run 2 puters for just this reason! 1 has windows 98, and Never ever had an issue....even now! But it does not support all programs XP does. Still you can run your XP on the Desk, and LT! Write.
HuggerZ!
Ariana

It is the motherboard. Dell had me go through hoops taking things apart and stuff.  There is no doubt. And there is no way to do a scan because the computer won't boot up.  It's all in the earlier posts in this thread.

I am using my old desktop since the laptop broke down. However, my desktop is also having problems now. I think the hard drive or something is failing. It might be something as simple as the power supply according to my friend, but I don't have the funds right now  to take it in to have it looked at.

So if I suddenly vanish from the net you'll know it's computer problems!

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi