ACER Aspire must Have a Virus...

My Aspire is "frozen" in a Windows restart screen. I have 30 seconds to restart and when the Windows XP start-up screen is displayed, it goes back to the black screen. Can anyone save me a trip to the Repair Shop? What can I do?
Randy

 

Try to boot from a pendrive and run CHKDSK. It seems like some Windows file is corrupted or mising.

If you see a fast blue screen just before it flicks and reboot, I'm sure the problem is it.

 

Thank you. I'll try that after I acquire a pendrive. Do I just plug it in and restart? Where might I find chkdsc?

 

If you google "Portable XP USB" (can't link to it here) and put that on your USB stick, you will boot into a minimal win32 environment. From there, you can open command prompt and run

Code:

chkdsk VOLUME:/f

where you replace VOLUME with the letter of your drive (Most likely C). Leave that running for a while until it completes and then restart and see if boots.