My wife's computer has trouble starting...when you push the power button the power light comes on , the CD drive light comes on , and it sits there and does nothing until it restarts and does the same thing again and again until it finally starts up. You can hear the fan in the power supply start but the hard drive light does not come on until it is finally ready to start up. This can take as long as 15-20 minutes. The only change's I have made since it started playing up were to uncheck the restart on all error's box and the boot device priority in the BIOS( it had been set to CD drive as first and I changed it to the hard drive.) The computer has not been moved or had any power surges that I know of....it sit's right beside my own computer and runs off the same power source. Once it finally starts up it runs fin and has no problems. It doesn't do it on every start up either.....My first thought was that it is the power supply....Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks...Dave.I don't have any experience with laptop diagnostic CARDS, but that would be my first recommendation if it were a desktop. Someone that knows of such a useful device for laptops can chime in hopefully.

Has the laptop had signs of strange behavior prior to this? Could be overheating, write error problems, any hiccups at all worth mentioning.

My approach is more of a shotgun method since not all symptoms are reported and not all symptoms reported lead to linear and logical solution paths. Stop at any point when you found the error causing the holdup. So to start, check the voltage of the power adapter using a multimeter and make sure it is very close to the specs written on the adapter. I would get a copy of Ubuntu and run the memtest86+ that it comes with. Let that make 5 full passes to see if the RAM clears testing. Get a copy of Drive Fitness Test and perform an analysis of your hard drive. Then use the Ubuntu disk and fire up the "Live CD" feature to see if the OS loads. Look for errors that may post during bootup that could lead to helpful troubleshooting info. If Ubuntu loads successfully then the problem is probably with the LOADED OS on the hard drive. In that case then I would suspect malware or a corrupt driver. Most likely it is malware in the case the OS is at fault.Quote from: Sn3akyP3t3 on April 11, 2010, 11:27:23 PM

I don't have any experience with laptop diagnostic cards, but that would be my first recommendation if it were a desktop. Someone that knows of such a useful device for laptops can chime in hopefully.

Has the laptop had signs of strange behavior prior to this? Could be overheating, write error problems, any hiccups at all worth mentioning.

My approach is more of a shotgun method since not all symptoms are reported and not all symptoms reported lead to linear and logical solution paths. Stop at any point when you found the error causing the holdup. So to start, check the voltage of the power adapter using a multimeter and make sure it is very close to the specs written on the adapter. I would get a copy of Ubuntu and run the memtest86+ that it comes with. Let that make 5 full passes to see if the RAM clears testing. Get a copy of Drive Fitness Test and perform an analysis of your hard drive. Then use the Ubuntu disk and fire up the "Live CD" feature to see if the OS loads. Look for errors that may post during bootup that could lead to helpful troubleshooting info. If Ubuntu loads successfully then the problem is probably with the loaded OS on the hard drive. In that case then I would suspect malware or a corrupt driver. Most likely it is malware in the case the OS is at fault.

Sn3akyP3t3, Where did you get the idea this was a laptop? Laptop power supplies generally dont have fans in them so I would say this is a desktop.