Dell computer running Vista Home Basic SP1 - 1 GB RAM, Intel P4 3.0 GHz processor. The computer will not restart - it starts (cold boot) and shuts down normally, but will not restart (hot boot). When attempting to restart, it logs off normally, then displays the "Shutting down" message, and after a time the screen goes black - and remains so indefinitely. At this point I have to press and hold the start button to get it to shut down completely - before pressing it again to start up normally (cold boot).
This would not normally be a problem I couldn't live with, but I'm trying to upgrade the BIOS (from Dell's site). The instructions from Dell say to run the downloaded EXE file from within Windows, and the BIOS is flashed after the computer restarts. Because of the problem described above, the computer will not restart as part of this BIOS upgrade process, and consequently does not upgrade to the latest version.
I've already tried setting the BIOS to "Factory default settings" but this did not help.
Any ideas - could there perhaps be a corruption in one of the Registry keys which controls the restart command?
