My desktop pc will not boot up, what should i do?

Is your computer still under warranty? Give Dell a call and see what they suggest.

the best decision in my opinion is to switch to Ubuntu Linux <...That’s just a silly joke…>

Make sure your keyboard is plugged in.

more importantly, make sure you have a PS2 keyboard and it’s plugged in, sometimes USB keyboards are a bit on the fritz with DOS

hit <f10> to see what happens, there may be some sort of recovery utility?

You will have to re-image your pc. You should have received a recovery cd with your computer things. Try that!

thanks for the info. i have recently added an external hard drive to store all of my music…..17000 song files, and i tried rebooting the computer without the hard hard drive plugged in and it worked. any ideas on why that is?

Thats actually something I ran into once. I would have my iPod plugged into the front USB ports, and it would always create issues when I wanted to boot up. But if I plugged into the USB ports in the back it was fine. Try using different ports and see what you come up with.

Also, I didn’t think of this at the time, but it might be something to do with the boot order somehow switching to USB instead of the hard drive and optical drives.

If you are having problems with it plugged in I would definitely change the boot order in the BIOS settings. You should get away with just the CD and Hard Drive in the boot order. Now it won’t try and boot off external media!