After a power outage, my pc loops except in safe mode. How can i tell if prob is hardware or software? Thanks!

Windows keeps shutting down and booting up. My Dell warranty just ran out on April 13th. Didn't renew cuz I hadn't had any major probs till now.





My son came over and did minor surgery - moved the ram and blew out the dust. The pc was ok for a day or so - then started looping again.





An AOL techie was kind enough to help - [Dell charges $99 to even talk to you] and he suggested trying safe mode and a System Restore. That got me able to boot up with limited functionality.





I'm typing this in safe mode with networking - but have no video/sound or printer/digicam capability. This limits what I can do on eBay. I'm semi-retired and live on a fixed income so eBay sales are important.





Is there any way I can test my pc to see where the problem is? It will be expensive to take it to a pc doctor.





My specs are as follows: Dell Dimension 4700 (one year old), Pentium IV, 2.8 ghz, 512 ram, Windows XP Home, Verizon DSL.





Any help you can give is appreciated. Thanks. ~ zenmoon

After a power outage, my pc loops except in safe mode. How can i tell if prob is hardware or software? Thanks!
dont system restore until nothing else works. if you can get in long enough to do this then do it or boot into safe mode then goto system properties and on the advance tab look down on the Startup and recovery then click settings then go in the re and disable the automatically restart option on the system failure. You are good to go it will give you an error then basically you research the error any way you want to get your answer i do recommend xp pro. xp home has alot of errors because of sp2. that will get you started. i would try also after that press F8 and select last known good configuration from the menu. hope this helps
Reply:Try taking out the battery about twenty minutes and putting it back in-on startup,go into setup and reset the clock and date. This may help.
Reply:There is this one tool called Ultimate Boot CD (+-158 MB) which can tell you what kind of problem you have, but if you don't have some experience into this it gets really tricky.





If blowing the RAM worked, you could try giving it some manteinance. Take the CPU to any Office Depot (or the like) and have it cleaned.



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