Hi Pam: I've been building these machines since 1990, although I have called it quits years ago, except for family and close friends. I have a collection of 'obsolete' motherboards starting with the 8088 and the 8086 and so on. This is my process of ilimination and has no concern for your own abilities for analysis it's just the way it would have to be worded/questioned. If you want some help, go through these steps and send me an email. What sounds do you have? If no sound at all, make sure there is not an on off power switch on the back of your power supply box. Make sure it's on and all plugs are tightly in and your power bar is also switched on. If you hear the power supply box but not any of the fans, try switching out your memory cards, they (or one)may be what burned out. If you hear your fans as well, listen for one beep, if you hear it, all is well with your hardware and something is wrong with your operating system bootup. Make sure you have no floppy disc of cdrom in your drawers. Most systems' bios' are set to have at least one of these to boot up first, in case of the need. They must be empty when you boot up normally everytime, if they are set up to check for a bootup disk first. If your motherboard is fried you will not get anything but the powersupply fan. Although if your second memory slot (and maybe some other rare places) is fried keep memory cards out of it - check the teeth on the memory card to. If it's your first slot that's burned (I have a gigabyte board that burned this one out), your motherboard is done in. While your in there, clean it out - those viscious little dust bunny are wickeder than you think. Crossing currents where they don't belong. Make sure it's unplugged before working in a machine. Also tighten all connections/cables and you'll likelier to have a smoother and faster machine than you had - supposing we can get it working. You can email me and let me know where you're at with it. Your lucky you have a second machine. I always keep an old Win98 around, eccential for internet info for some repairs or analysis. Which environment do you have? Windows XP? It would help to know if you have a P2 or newer as well. 1 ghz or better. If so press F8 on boot up to try to get to safe mode. Once in, you can use system restore back to a prior date. Virus's can remove the boot sector (genb and genp are older virus' that did this) but that doesn't mean your machine can't be rebuilt. I'm hoping to avoid the process of booting up from another disk as that's a whole new ball game. It's pretty much a call to rebuild your software environment which will scrub out all your prior data. But it is a whole lot easier to rebuild than in the old days as long as you have all original disks. Keep 'em clean people, they'll purr for you - Sandy

In your initial post you say you have left the computer switched on but it is frozen. Is that the state right now? If so you need to remove the left side panel and look at the fan on the motherboard to see if it is spinning. Perhaps this is as simple as the processor cooling fan quitting. The computer would quit to protect your CPU or processor from overheating. As you have a new computer on order perhaps we can assume this machine is a bit older. After checking the fan mentioned above switch off the computer, remove the power cord from the rear of the case and check the cooling fins underneath that fan. Are they full of dust and dirt? If so a can of compressed air will work wonders, be sure to place a finger on the fan to prevent it spinning wildly as you use the compressed air to remove all that crud. (Do this outside if it is particularly dirty, saves a lot of dusting afterwards) Your data is probably safe because the hard drive is probably still good to go. What ever happens you could use this as a wake up call and back up your data. Also if you have not already done it you should create a set of recovery disks - unless Dell provided them at purchase time of course.

I think someone mentioned that what you posted, the registry change wasn't necessarily bad but could be from a program being removed. I wonder if there is a way to find out if you were actually infected with something? This is why I suggested the Panda scan because it would have told you. btw, make sure you do windows updates. I personally would get rid of Mcafee. I know you paid for it but it's a resource hog. For backups I have multiple hard drives, they are cheap. I have an external enclosure that holds 2 drives. I have a computer running windows XP, installed the Maxtor Maxblast program and use that to back up to the larger drives. As far as I know, they don't have a program (Maxtor) like this for Vista but I could be wrong. What it will do is back it up as files verses a file that you have to unpack. If you back up your C drive, you will see every folder on the C drive in your backup.

Today I am using the computer lab at church. The hospital computers have restricted access and I could not get on Facebook. There are no restrictions on the church computers. Since it is spring break, no college students around to compete with for computer time. There is a wedding here today at 4 p.m. The bride and attendents have been at the church since 8:30 a.m. I can't imagine why they want to hang out here all day. Even the groom and groomsmen were here when I arrived at 1 p.m.