This is a long shot but is the battery still good? My HP won't run 
without a battery. My Dell Latitude,  or my IBM Thinkpad will work 
just fine without the battery, but not my HP Presario.  Remove the 
battery and it won't run. So maybe if it goes bad it won't run 
properly either. I would ask the question in the HP support forums.

I would  disable sleep, or hibernate mode to make sure the problem 
isn't related to them. Sometimes people don't realize that their 
laptop isn't really OFF, it's just taking a nap and you have to use 
the right keystrokes to wake it up without going through a shutdown 
startup routine.

If that isn't it, and you are sure the display is OK, and it 
isn't  just a case of not seeing anything on the display, (you can 
test this by plugging into an external display), then I would suspect 
the power supply, power regulator, or something on the motherboard.

Mark Rode


>I have an HP Pavilion laptop, about 6 tears old, running WinXP. 
>Lately, it has been starting erratically - sometimes right away, 
>other times requiring repeated pressings of the Start button. 
>Sometimes only the lights will come on but nothing happens on the screen.
>Has anyone any insight into what causes this and how it can be fixed?
>Gratefully,
>Ron Smith
>

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