Screen is frozen, no keystrokes do anything. cannot turn off laptop. can't take out battery. What do you do to shutdown and restart in this situation. With other laptops, used to taking out battery as last result to restart.

Chris Busch

• 474 Answers
• Posted on Feb 16, 2009

SOURCE: Starts round and round in circles

I have the solution for you, try this and let me know.

Im asuming its doing what is called, " The windows boot loop" or as we call it at work anyways.

Dells are known for this.

let me guess, it starts up normally, gets to the windows startup but asks you to pick between 4 different start up options like safe mode.


Do you have your original CD that came with it, or at least a windows XP CD?

You will need one.

What you do is,

1st: Bot from CD. Start the machine with the Winxp CD in the drive, hit F12 for boot options, or whatever key function it is. Do this as soon as you turn it on,

2: select " Boot from CD" and press any key when it askes if you want to boot from CD.

3: It will load like your doing a fresh install of windows. Thats alright, its normal and no it wont re-install windows at this point.

4: Once it loads, it will have some options. Pres " R" for repair.

It will go out and to the command prompt after about 5 seconds.

5: once at the command prompt, type in exactly ( CHKDSK C: /P ) Dont include the ( ) . Then press "Enter key "

6: after it runs the disk check, normally about 3 to 5 minutes, It will finishand go back to C:/


Just type ( EXIT ), Enter key, and let it reboot.

you can remove the disk now or later, shouldnt matter, It will go to the options screen like before, but just let it default to the normal startup, or hit enter.

Windows should now load fine and you shouldnt get that message at startup anymore.


WHY THIS HAPPENED?, you may be asking.

For some reason, certain Dell Hardware and software conflict, usually when you have installed some new program, or for just no reason.

Your Boot Up files get corrupt or cleared and windows needs those to start.

What you did was re-installed those windows files.


Now copy and paste into a word document and print it out in case it happens again. Not likley but it could.

This works with any computer experienceing this issue, usually, unless there is something worse going on.

You can help other now that you know how and become a hero, make sure to charge them $10 though for your time:)


Let me know if this doesnt work and we can try something else.

Good Luck.