Still battling this freeze-up problem on my Dell laptop. I may do grievous bodily harm to the next person who suggests I just need to reinstall Windows. I am seeing freeze-ups occur when the BIOS is loading, long before Windows is even touched. To prove that Windows could not possibly be involved, I removed the floppy drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the hard drive, and as the BIOS was loading, the thing still froze for several minutes before unfreezing. I'm running Dell diagnostics right now -- it boots to DOS from a floppy -- and it's frozen up six times already, but has only failed one test so far. (The serial port was too speedy, it says.)
In the extended entry, you can see blurry screenshots of the boot screen, where it consistently freezes up -- maybe someone out there can give me a clue:
Here's the startup screen -- taken with a digital camera that I couldn't keep still enough, but you can at least get the idea.
Those words around the progress bar are "Inspiron 4000" (above) and "BIOS Revision A23" (below). Look at the closeup of the progress bar below. The progress bar always gets stuck right at that point, just above the "I" in "BIOS". I assume that represents a certain point in the power-on self-test, and if I knew what that point was perhaps that would give me a clue as to what component is having problems.
Thanks in advance for any assistance. I have tried the Dell message boards but to no avail so far.
