Computer Fix the first

Well, since I've been doing this I though it might be useful to explain what happened, why, and how I fixed it. The first one might be disappointing ...

First customer was a nice lady with a laptop that would only boot sometimes. The rest of the time it would just sit there with a black screen of death. The obvious thing to try was to switch on boot logging (run msconfig, tick "boot logging"). Unfortunately this didn't show anything useful, except that windoze wasn't booting at all (i.e. no log entries).

So, cue a lot of messing about with the new lovely Vista boot settings. I still don't know what fixed it, but I suspect that Vista had got it's knickers in a twist about something in the boot loader,
or the files. So I tried ticking and unticking various boxes, broke it worse, and then fixed it.

I also fixed the CD drive by pushing it firmly back into it's socket.

That was a Compaq laptop of some kind.