Mine wouldn't boot at all. I called Dell, ran through diagnostics, and they said they couldn't repair it and that it wasn't covered by their warranty (which otherwise covers me until 2011), so I should call Geek Squad. (Hmph - so much for Dell's warranty.)
Fortunately there' s a Geek Squad as part of the Best Buy store just a few blocks away from me. I took my pc in.
1.5 weeks later I have it back, the operating system reinstalled, and all my data (nearly 500 GB) rescued and successfully backed up on an external 1 T drive. It's gonna be a pain to reinstall all the programs, but at least all my work is there.
What was the problem? I occasionally leave my computer on all night to enable processing of files and to help clean up and to automatically download updates. Microsoft pushed down an update, but it was incompatible with a sound driver (I use high quality sound software from M Audio). That incompatibility led to corruption of one of the Vista startup files.
Definitely another bad mark for Microsoft. From now on, I do all my updates manually.
Kudos to Geek Squad! Thank you very much!
