Date: 09/18/05 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

I have a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop, Windows XP (Professional, if that makes a difference), Pentium 4, that I just got last March. It was working just fine up until about a week ago when something went wrong. When I booted it up, a screen came up prompting me to choose either Windows XP Professional or Windows XP professional setup. I chose the former, which brought me to a new screen. This said that something had gone wrong and gave me a list of options with which to start my computer. They were:

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Command Prompt
Safe Mode with Networking Capabilities (something along those lines)
Last Good Configuration
Start Windows Normally

When I chose Start Windows Normally, a blue screen came up. It said that my BIOS was not fully ACPI compliant. It also instructed me to go to www.hardware-update.com (I did, and it's just an advertising site) or contact my system vendor. It also said that if I can't do any of these things, I should press F7 when prompted to install storage drivers; that would disable ACPI.

After the paragraph of text, it showed this:

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x00000011, 0x00000007, 0xF9FE9C00, 0x0100000E)

This exact same blue screen came up when I chose Last Good Configuration.

I went through this cycle of turning off my computer manually and rebooting, only to come up to the same previous screen. When I chose Safe Mode, a regular black screen came up saying Windows failed to boot up and it displayed this as the problem:

\system32\hal.dll

So, first of all: what exactly is a BIOS? What is ACPI compliant? And how can I make a BIOS ACPI compliant so my computer will work again? If anyone can dechiper what's going on, please help me...I can't start Windows at all. My computer boots up, and just kind of stops working at that blue screen.

I also apologize in advance for my ineptitude with computers...I appreciate any advice you could give me.

x-posted to computerhelp

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computer_help/489412.html