Broke another laptop

[Glaucus]

Got an acer 3000 ferrari laptop. very slow. But had w7 on and all I did was use it to browse the net and a tiny bit of openoffice.
(Mobile Athlon XP 2500+ with Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics, 512MB DDR RAM, 60GB hard disk)

Working fine until I decided, totally forgetting how old it was. To open up all bookmarks for today 376 of them(firefox). Obviously it ground to a halt. Couldn't even get to task manager. So held down power button for 10 seconds until it turned off. Turn it back on and bam no screen. Fans and hdd seem to spin up for a couple of seconds, then gfx card fan reduces speed and stays at a low speed. if you open up the cd drive and put something in it spins it for a few seconds and the light flashes.

But still no display.
Any ideas. I don't see how that could of broke it, coincidence maybe. Is there a way to reset bios.

[Del Lardo]

I'm not the best person to ask, I'm on my 4th laptop and 3rd Blackberry since last November.

Don't make em like they used to!

[Mark]

Remove all power sources and let it cool down. Try again in an hour.

[Glaucus]

well it fired up this mourning to the

press f* to resume or f* to setup.

Stupidly went for the resume, now it's doing the same. Will leave it to day and see if I can get back to that screen tomorrow and do setup.

At least it means it's not totally dead. yet..

[LeperousDust]

No matter how many bookmarks and how you grind your laptop to a halt it will generally never break it, it will only need a rest...

[Glaucus]

Yeah I don't think you can break it liek that, it's just software. I'm putting it down to coincidence.

[Mark]

Take the battery out, unplug the mains, then press the power button.
Plug power back in and press the power button again. Immediately start tapping away at the Ctrl key like you're on a fragging frenzy. Do this at least until any POST messages/logo disappear.
Hopefully you'll get some options up on screen at this point. You want Windows to ignore restore information and boot normally - I can't remember how Win7 words this but if you're not sure, post the options you see and it'll be easy to tell you the correct one.

[Glaucus]

cheers mark. Just tried taht and it works about 1 in 3 attempts. And pressing Esc rather than ctrl.

If it gets to the mem test screen it boots fine.

So does this mean it's a bios/mobo problem?
Doing a full shut down and restart breaks it again.

[Mark]

Could be memory. Pressing Esc will usually bypass some POST checks, and most prominent among them would be the memory test.

The technique using Ctrl key is for Windows boot problems.