How else can the mice read what I'm typing and squeak it down the intertubes?

You have a light bulb in your laptop?

backlights in laptop screens, (real pain to change), can cause symptoms like this-
see if its accessing the hard drive on startup, just not showing anything on the screen

Hello Titus,

Ok, im not so confused anymore. Windows is corrupt.
She needs to either try booting into safemode so she can do scandisk and fix all errors. or use BART PE to to run chkdsk or if she still has it use the recovery cd and do a non destructive restore if she can.

It's a pritty regular occurance with any windows operating system, it just gets messed up a bit when nobody bothers to do system maintenance like chkdsk/scandisk and defragmenting. or microsoft send it an update which doesnt work with you pc which turns it into a paper weight.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

It's a pretty regular occurrence with any windows operating system, it just gets messed up a bit when nobody bothers to do system maintenance like chkdsk/scandisk and defragmenting. or microsoft send it an update which doesn't work with you pc which turns it into a paper weight.

Not at all regular; very rare indeed.

A recovery disk such as Hiren's Boot CD will fix most boot problems.

Last 18 months, I've fixed about 7 computers where the boot sequence was corrupt by using either bart or the windows install disk to run chkdsk and fix all errors.
For me it's quite regular. other regular faults are the master boot record, which can be fixed using the windows install disk. None of these computers belong to me, they are just people who come into the community centre.

Which county are you in Titus, in Kent libraries they have computer buddies who can show your friend how to fix the fault for free. Cant really say for other counties.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

... She needs to either try booting into safemode so she can do scandisk and fix all errors ...

Quite. Which is why, right at the beginning, I asked if Vista can be booted into safe mode, and if so, how, and whether that would enable the hard drive to be checked, and if so, how.

So far, no-one has told me.

Suggestions of telliing a completely non-technical friend, over the telephone, to dismantle their computer, remove the hard drive and then somehow to acquire a caddy so that she could test the hard drive with another computer (which she does not have) are not quite so helpful.

She has no Windows restore disk and I have no idea if there is a hidden restore file on the hard drive or, if there is, how to access it.

As far as I can determine, either (1) the hard drive is knackered, or (2) the Vista operating system is corrupted so that it won't load.

Either way, it seem sensible to find out what diagnostics can be run using utilities which can be run before Windows tries to load.

Of course, if the firmware which runs the computer prior to loading Windows is corrupted, then I guess she has a real problem. How to determine if that is the case?

I'd start by reading the replies you already have.

In reply to a post by Titus:

Quite. Which is why, right at the beginning, I asked if Vista can be booted into safe mode, and if so, how, and whether that would enable the hard drive to be checked, and if so, how.

So far, no-one has told me.

During the initial boot sequence press F8 repeatedly, this should bring up the Safe Mode options menu.

One can get technical by reading and trying.

F8 and then safe mode as has been pointed out quite a few times.

Then a diagnostics prog by the HD manufacturer can be run but might not give correct information.

Google would give you all this information.

In reply to a post by john2007:

I'd start by reading the replies you already have.

That's a brilliant idea - I never thought of doing that! Thank you ...