Thanksgiving break just started today. Been looking forward to it for weeks. Finally got a break from college so I went out to buy a new game to play over vacation. I have a Dell XPS (winxp pro 3.6ghz, 2gbmemory, etc). Anyway, computer was working fine earlier today. I unpluged it to take it back home with me for my 5 days off. I was careful, didn't shake or bank anything. It's possible a small drop of rain hit the case when I carried it out to the car... about 2 hours later I hooked it up back home. Everything was hooked up correctly. I turned the power on and the lights came on but nothing showed up on the screen. Instead I just heard what sounded like the fan going crazy. It was very loud and was blowing air. Nothing happened so I shut off power and tried again and again... about the fifth try it finally booted normally. I cracked open the box to my new pc game, entered the cd into the cd tray, closed it, and the autolaunch attempted to open it only to succeed in opening a frozen white screen. When I attempted to move any windows previously open, it'd leave streaks from the screen all over the place, making a mess of my desktop. I had to force quit. I turning the power off and back on. I tried restarting... doesn't work. Whenever I enter any cd the autoplay just freezes. I look at the cd-rom drive icon under "my computer" and it shows the battlefield 2 icon on it (indicating that the cd is battlefield 2). What's odd is that the cd isn't battlefield 2 and I uninstalled battlefield 2 just before unplugging the computer earlier today. The game isn't even on my computer anymore, yet the cd-rom seems to be trying to read it off every cd I put in the drive.
What's going on? It's a brand new (maybe 3 or 4 months old), 3,000+ dollar desktop (monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard not included). So much for a good vacation...
Anyway, if anyone has any helpful advice or ideas, please let me know. I'm desperate for assistance.... I'll try calling Dell tech support tomorrow but in my experience that rarely leads anywhere. What are the possible explanations for whatever is wrong?
thanks
What's going on? It's a brand new (maybe 3 or 4 months old), 3,000+ dollar desktop (monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard not included). So much for a good vacation...
Anyway, if anyone has any helpful advice or ideas, please let me know. I'm desperate for assistance.... I'll try calling Dell tech support tomorrow but in my experience that rarely leads anywhere. What are the possible explanations for whatever is wrong?
thanks
