Boot problem

[jacwat]

WINDOWS XP MEDIA CENTER 2005
ACER ASPIRE T180

Hi
I expect this question has been asked before and Im sorry for repeating it just that I can't see an answer to my problem.
A friend asked me to look at their PC as it seemed to have a few viruses and pop ups etc.. as I am familiar with sorting this kind of thing out myself I offered to take it home and see what I could do.
I did a clean up and defrag (the pc had not been used for some time) and tried to log on to the internet.   I loaded the cd with the drives for my wireless dongle and on restart I got the message 'F12 for boot menu' any options from F12 resulted in a black or blank screen.
Tapping F8 will bring up the screen to get into safe mode (I was going to try a system restore) but this also resulted in a blank screen.
On power on I get one short beep, the fans atc.. appear to be working.
I would be very gratefull for any help with this as I started off with a computer which was as least working when I offered my help!

There is no disk for doing re-install either and even if I had one would I be able to re-load windows with  the pc in this state?

thank you in anticipation

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

You have the monitor I hope plugged into the graphics card not the motherboard VGA connector. If it is showing the boot menu then it has finished posting so the computer is technically working. You could try booting from a cd and running memtest if it does this ok then there is only the hard drive to check. This is best done with the hard drive manufactures diagnostics .

Lisa_maree

[Allan]

Are you saying that this began on the first boot after you removed the malware?

[jacwat]

Thank you both for your comments-
The monitor must be plugged in to the right bit as is was ok until I did a restart after using a cd for the drivers for my wireless dongle.  (I wanted to go online to download something to remove the malware but never got that far)
Up until that point I had only uninstalled a few programmes that weren't needed such as extra toolbars etc... nothing important I just wanted to clean up a bit.   Then I did a disk cleanup and started a defrag, the defrag didn't complete as the driver install for the dongle wanted me to restart.   Also I had left the cd in the drive accidentally and wondered if that may have caused this problem.

So if I use a cd to try to boot what do I use?...Sorry to be vague but I do need simple talk as Im a beginner with a problem like this!

Thank you again x

[Lisa_maree]

Oh dear,

It's possible that the wireless driver install restarted the computer while defrag was running. This can be catastrophic and is possibly why windows won't start now. If that is the case you will need a windows media center CD to reload. Sorry