[penmar]

Hi, I purchased a used dell inspiron 7500 that is supposed to be windows xp, celeron processor, 128 mb ram, blah blah. When I turn it on nothing happens beyond the dell inspiron screen. Am I doing something wrong or is this computer fried? Also, we found a floppy inside the drive that says windows 98 second edition boot disk...so it's probably not windows xp??? What can I do?

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Hate to state the obvious,BUT did you try to boot with the disc removed?
Are you ok with going into the cmos and having a look?
with the disc out of drive A start the machine it will then have on screen to enter setup press..... On dell it is normally F2 read the screen and push the requried key, this will bring you into cmos go to the second option which should be advanced options. This will have a list in there one of the items will be the boot order.
Make sure it is set to boot from c drive. you normally change the boot order with the pageup pagedown button when you have done this hit esc which will bring you back to the main screen. on the right hand side it should have the option to save and exit. choose this option it will ask are you sure put in Y and exit. Does it boot now.
Read rule 2 in my signature

[peterm]

Hate to state the obvious,BUT did you try to boot with the disc removed?
Are you ok with going into the cmos and having a look?
with the disc out of drive A start the machine it will then have on screen to enter setup press..... On dell it is normally F2 read the screen and push the requried key, this will bring you into cmos go to the second option which should be advanced options. This will have a list in there one of the items will be the boot order.
Make sure it is set to boot from c drive. you normally change the boot order with the pageup pagedown button when you have done this hit esc which will bring you back to the main screen. on the right hand side it should have the option to save and exit. choose this option it will ask are you sure put in Y and exit. Does it boot now.
Read rule 2 in my signature

[penmar]

Tried everything that you mentioned ....nothing happens with or without the floppy. Guess we'll take it to a geek in hte real world.........Thanks

[peterm]

1) When the machine starts start tapping F8 straight away
we hope that this will give you a menu with a list of options.
if this does try Last known good configuration. if this does not work try safe mode

2)If you have a burner go to www.bootdisc.com and download the xp boot disc.
Go back into the cmos and change the boot order to boot from cd.

[penmar]

Thanks for all your help....took it to the geek squad at best buy today and when the guy turned it on....... it booted right to windows XP? ? so we left it with them for a good check-up and updates. Just shows to go you that computers don't like me!