Two days ago I began having intermittant problems: my desktop beeps, recognizes the drives but as it begins to boot, the screen goes black. Twice I was able to restart (after several attempts) to get windows running. Today, about 50 attempts later - no go. I tried booting from the CD - it hangs at "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration ...". I tried booting from a floppy - I can hear the A drive reading the disk but it hangs at "Verifying DMI Pool Data ............". Finally, I tried F8 to get into safe mode - no option would run, it just hangs and will not respond to ENTER. I reseated all the cables, the CPU and jiggled everything I could jiggle to break any surface gook. But to no avail. I'm not sure this is a software issue because it appears that the OS is not loading. Any ideas are greatly appreciated in advance. I have a 900MHz 30G, HardDrive, 256 Mb RAM, CD, CD/RW+DVD/RW and of course a floppy disc drive. Yes, its about 5 years old. The only weird thing I did recently was I accidentally plugged my cell phone into the USB cable because I thought it was my charger.