Gibberish when powering up

[Guest]

Running a Compaq Presario/ Win XP home. In the past two weeks when I turn on
the machine with the power button, the entire screen shows quotation marks
"", after about 4-5 minutes it changes to wingdings, once the wingdings
stabilize, one of the two following will allow a normal start up. 1. use
Escape key. 2. Turn power off and after 1 min. start back up and it boots up
just fine....baffled...I am worried my hard drive is going bad or am missing
some boot files.

 

[Chuck Davis]

Your description indicates that you should back up your data before doing
anythng else. The you might try removing sypware. MS has a new AntiSpyware
(Beta) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en

 

[Vanguard]

Running a Compaq Presario/ Win XP home. In the past two weeks when I
turn on
the machine with the power button, the entire screen shows quotation
marks
"", after about 4-5 minutes it changes to wingdings, once the
wingdings
stabilize, one of the two following will allow a normal start up. 1.
use
Escape key. 2. Turn power off and after 1 min. start back up and it
boots up
just fine....baffled...I am worried my hard drive is going bad or am
missing
some boot files.

Don't know if what you are seeing is before the OS loads or during it.
Boot using a floppy to bypass loading anything of your operating system
(you can get a floppy image at http://www.bootdisk.com).