XP desk top computer won't boot. Upon turning machine on, only a black screen appears with seven "characters" of: a backward 'f', square happy face, heart, cap letter 'A', lower case 'f', a comma, and what looks like a bell or a Christmas tree, and then a blinking cursor. Hit enter or any other key, and all that happens is a repeat of this line of characters.
Cannot reach safe mode, not even by repeatedly pressing F8 with power turn-on. I can get to F1, F6 (I think I recall), and F10, but none of these keys appear to be the ones to lead me to be able to load the XP desktop.
This is my mother's (82 years) computer, purchased three months ago. I am troubleshooting this from my computer, as I can't reach this forum from her machine! We had additional hard drive memory and ram installed upon purchase and it was performing (reasonably) okay until this.
NOTE: Day before this problem, I attempted to install a Linksys (Cisco) WPC54G wireless-G notebook adaptor 6 to my father's 5 to 6-year-old Sony Vaio laptop so he could get Internet and e-mail via the modem on my mother's machine. I ran into all sorts of problems, it is still not working. This attempted, failed installation could be a coincidence of timing, or maybe part of the problem?
What is this line of characters? A system crash, a virus? I am so frustrated. Also, I see now that this computer did not come with rescue disks (arrggh). Any ideas, please?
Lisa B.
