Back up, and I give Microsoft some good marks here. After typing the above, I considered what else was noted in recent operation. Last night I also updated Acrobat Professional (The Industry strength Acrobat) to 7.0.9. I noted the update, for reasons yet unknown, of Acrobat required my back-up drive "F" be on line, it was not powered up on my restart of the desk-top environment. So, I decided to power down "F" and try again to reboot the notebook. It booted this time. Now for good marks for Microsoft, XP Home kept a record that it had a "serious boot problem" and asked if I wanted to report to Microsoft, I did, and that returned their biref help statement which confirmed the external hard drive as a possible source of the problem, they of course didn't know anything about the Acrobat update. Hope this helps others. No, I hope no one else has this problem, even though I got it "fixed" (hope so) in about 10 minutes.

That's a good question. I was using a Dell Inspiron 4000 w/ windows 2000 professional and before that a Compaq latitude (I think) also with Win2000 professional. The compaq had a lot of the typical corporate stuff on it, like outlook, office, etc. Both of these computers took at least 3 minutes to get up and running, despite turning off apps from start-up, periodically running antivirus, ad-aware, etc., and also defragging and running disc-clean-up. Based on all this, and also through conversations with strangers on their laptops (in places like Panera, starbucks, etc.) I thought that a couple minutes was typical. If I could get the Inspiron to boot in less than a minute I would keep it. But right now it's too aggravating to use. Any advice on that would be greatly appreciated.

Shaddy please ignore your second thread requesting help. I had replied there before realising you had 2 threads running on the same issue. This only causes confusion. Below is what I had written on the other thread............ This is more likely a software issue than anything to do with hardware. Does the loading stop at the same spot each time? How long after the black screen do you wait before you shut down and re-start? Leave it a little longer next time to see if it cures itself as it seems like a corrupt file. Watch the flashing of the activity light on the front of your tower, does it stop about the same time as the black screen? Next time this happens and you reboot take a look here once it is running click Start click Control panel click Administrative tools click Event viewer Do not get frightened off by all the gibberish you see while doing the next bit Shaddy. Just quietly review it for clues so we can help you get this sorted out. Now we have a new window with 2 sides, on the left side click on System. Now look on the right side for red error messages, scrolling down if needed. Double click on any of these to see what it says. You may not understand much of it but look for clues and any error message and error number. There is also a link underlined and in blue text, you can click on that the bring up a help page. When you have finished there go back to the left side of the Event viewer window and click on Application and see what there is there regarding errors or warnings.

This is more likely a software issue than anything to do with hardware. Does the loading stop at the same spot each time? How long after the black screen do you wait before you shut down and re-start? Leave it a little longer next time to see if it cures itself as it seems like a corrupt file. Watch the flashing of the activity light on the front of your tower, does it stop about the same time as the black screen? Next time this happens and you reboot take a look here once it is running click Start click Control panel click Administrative tools click Event viewer Do not get frightened off by all the gibberish you see while doing the next bit Shaddy. Just quietly review it for clues so we can help you get this sorted out. Now we have a new window with 2 sides, on the left side click on System. Now look on the right side for red error messages, scrolling down if needed. Double click on any of these to see what it says. You may not understand much of it but look for clues and any error message and error number. There is also a link underlined and in blue text, you can click on that the bring up a help page. When you have finished there go back to the left side of the Event viewer window and click on Application and see what there is there regarding errors or warnings.