Ok, I start my laptop (Gateway w/Vista Home Prem.) and it goes through the startup, gets past the screen that says Microsoft and a bar showing progress, and then it just stops. It does not load Vista.

I haven't changed anything. I have to restart it over and over before it finally loads.
I ran startup repair and it says nothing is wrong. I've cleaned up files and checked to make sure I have enough memory and all that. I have had a problem with my power cord and have another on the way, but even when it's on battery, I still have to restart repeatedly before Vista will load. Laptop is 4 years old.

I've never had problems with it before and it's driving me nuts!

Any help would be much appreciated! (just don't tell me I should have bought a Mac! )

funny you have a gateway laptop too, I have a refurbished one that does the same thing - I got tired of redoing /re installing windows XP pro on it, so I now have a Linux OS on it.

I think mine has a faulty hard drive with some bad sectors, and I mainly using it a spare when the guys are on the desktop. So no important info is on it if hard drive finally does croak.

The Linux OS loads up a lot faster and is quicker to reinstall if I need to do that.
But sometimes I have to reboot it quite a few times before it will actually open to the log on page.

So you might look into the hard drive, and see if you can scan if for errors

info-
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&h...fd2b5286cafcf7

Are you able to get into safe mode at all?

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm#03
Getting into Windows Safe Mode.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/w...t-is-safe-mode
What is safe mode?

I had a similar problem as you described in the first paragraph but I was running xp pro, not vista.
Turned out to be some sort of major error which was described as a "loop". It beat me unfortunately.

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p.s. you should have bought a mac.

I had similar problems and it was the hard drive failing.
4 years is a long time these days!
Both of mine in the new PC went within 2 years-luckily under warranty.
Take it to a PC repair shop where they may be able to download your files safely, then run some tests.
Mind you, the repair shop said no problems, then next week it crashed, so....
Anyway, prepare for the dreaded crash.

Thanks everyone!

I ran chkdsk and it came up with no problems. I ran startup repair and it came up with no problems. I still don't trust it.

At this point we are logging off of individual accounts and then putting it in sleep mode while we wait for the new power cord and then we shall see if it helps. I am wondering if it's just not getting enough power to start windows. My battery is old too and it has gone past half life of what it used to be.

As long as I don't shut down completely it doesn't seem to have any problems, so sleep it is!
I am getting a portable hard drive this week to back everything up, and hoping it lasts until then!