For a few days I have bee getting intermittent freezes; the machine needs to be manually shut down. Now it won't boot up at all. The lights come on, and the optical drives go through their little light show, but then everything stops. I never even get to any of the bootup screens. No BIOS, no RAM check, no Windows startup--nothing. The monitor is blank--the monitor is not the problem--the machine just stops. I should probably add that it has done this intermittently ever since I had it, but would always then go boot up normally when it hung if I pressed the cute little reboot button.

A week or 2 previously the system hung up when shutting down and lost the internet connection. I ascribed that to updating my AVG software. After removing AVG and running AVAST instead that problem seemed to disappear--I don't know if that is related.

What could be the culprit and how and where do I start?

Thanks.

PS That machine has my chaos casc. password on it, which I forgot, so I won't be logging in there for a bit. Tell Glance--it is not French Guiana, but a place that has been in the news.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
~Jeremy Bentham