Need help - System wont bootup!

My son's PC, a 3 yr old Dell Dimension with Windows XP (Home Ed.) won't boot, not even into safe mode! After the BIOS startup info, the PC displays a blue screen with a Windows message to the effect regarding possible corruption, bad drivers, etc.

He says it was working ok until yesterday, and he doesn't know what he may have done wrong. It does have PC-cillin running on it, but my son forgot to tell me that the subscription expired the end of last month. Other than GoBack, there are no backups. Using GoBack, his PC still won't boot after reverting back to a time (2-days ago) when the system was supposedly ok!

Could this be caused by a virus? What should we now do?

Please help!

 

To furnish more information, the PC goes through it's initial startup/recognition sequence and then the screen goes blue with a message to the effect: "A serious problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown in order to prevent damage to the computer"...

...It then goes on to say that the problem could be insufficient disk space (this past April, his 30GB hard drive was only 50% full), or a bad video driver, or improper BIOS settings, etc. It then suggests starting up in safe mode (which I did, but the blue-screen with the same message comes back)!

As I said in my original post, the AntiVirus program (PC-cillin) has not been updated for the past 3-weeks, so I was wondering if this problem could be the result of a virus, and if so, what can I do about it if the system won't startup?

Please help!

 

Hi Desperate,

It seems you have two threads going on the same topic; the other thread being in the Software & Services forum: Son's PC Won't Bootup!

Since it can become quite confusing with replies being given in two separate threads, I will close this one now, and ask that you continue followup in the other thread. Also, Software & Services forum would be the more appropriate forum for this topic until we're able to determine whether the problem is due to hardware or malware.

Regards,

snap