"R. H. Breener Jr." wrote in message ...
I want to thank you for your time, but this is way beyond my expertise,
not for the average Joe or Jane to attempt. The most I've ever done was
remove the case and blow out the dust. I'll see if I can find someone
with more experience with computers to do this. I seriously doubt any of
our friends or family would attempt it in case something goes wrong and it
wont boot at all.

Best not to try it if you're not comfortable with it. I wish I could
suggest some business I'd trust to take it to, but I've got little faith in
any of the big-box places. But for what it's worth, I agree its best to
find someone you have some faith in who knows what a BIOS settings reset is.
If your day-job has an IT department, I've often found that they'll help out
with employee personal machines. Though they'll usually want to to promise
that, if they break it worse, you'll accept "sorry" and not give them a hard
time about it.

I have no idea how to set the BIOS. I don't think I've ever even seen it.
I was afraid this problem would be a serious one, not something easy to
fix.

I don't think it's serious in the nature of something physically broken. I
think it's serious in that it's fouled up something that the average user
can't fix. The last thing you might try is a recovery from the installation
DVD. This might work if the recovery partition, which you've used already,
is corrupted in some way.

The only other failure I've seen that plays out like this is a pending hard
drive failure. But given your description of the proximate cause, I don't
think that's it. I suspect that something went weird during the updates and
it's fouled your BIOS settings. Microsoft update shouldn't do that, but as
I recall they've started to also deliver vendor specific updates as well.
Without seeing what it tried to do to your machine, I'm thinking a vendor
specific update changed something in the CMOS or Flash equivalent of it and
did it wrong.

Doing something like this by email/text is difficult. I'll have to call
around and see if any of my friends or neighbors can recommend someone
with experience in fixing or working on PCs. I don't mind paying someone
if they know what they're doing. I'll let you know if I can find someone.

Please do. I always like to know what the problem was when I hear of
something like this.

- Bill