I'm using an IBM Thinkpad T42 -- as of this morning, it won't do anything once it gets to the opening screen -- no icons on the left, no start button, no system tray on the bottom right, just the screen pic itself.

I can start it in Safe Mode but I can't do a System Restore from there.

Any ideas?

I'm not really sure if this will help but:

Try going into the BIOS and under Security disable the Predesktop Menu.

Another good idea would be to remove the screw that holds in your hard drive tray, remove the hard drive, use some computer duster (or just blow) on the hard drive pins and in the hard drive port. Re-seat the hard drive and put the screw back in.

Re-seating the memory would be another good step. Unfortunately I think it is under the keyboard in that model. Remove the screws on the bottom of the laptop marked with the keyboard icon. The keyboard should then be loose and you can carefully remove it. A small flathead screwdriver helps. If you have more than one memory module try turning on the laptop with only one of them installed at a time to check for bad RAM.

How long have you owned it? Usually RAM doesn't gradually go out, it does eventually die but that usually isn't until many years after use (usually).

The harddrive might need dusting, that is a good idea, but I'm leaning towards heat issues. Use a can of compressed air and blow out every vent on your laptop, then follow jro's instructions on removing the harddrive tray (you may want to look up a more in depth explanation depending on how good you are with the laptop).

Something else you might want to try if you installed anything new recently is uninstall it in Safe Mode. It could be that you recently installed a new program, accidently downloaded malware of some sort and that is what is keeping it from running.

Hmmm, sounds like a registry problem (not finishing the boot up)...

sounds like a hard drive or registry corruption issue. When it "stops booting" can you hear the hard drive continue to spin, or does it stop as well....

in my personal experinece with this - if the hard drive stops in the same place at boot, it leans toward being a hard drive issue (i.e. the HD is going bad) If the pc get's to this same point, and the hard drive is accessed every 15-20 seconds or so, it sounds like a registry corruption issue...

Either way, I hope you have a backup of your important date - because the recovery can be ugly. You could always buy an adaptor for the HD, take out the HD and plug it into a desktop to see if the HD is working or not...

Some questions/observations:

1. did you make any configuration changes before the last successful boot up? Using the "last known good config" boot option would help in this case

2. if you are starting in safe mode ok, it may be that you have a bad piece of hardware... try turning off the wifi card via that littel switch on the bottom of your thinkpad.

3. if you are starting in safe mode OK, you can have some bad sectors on the HD, or a corrupted registry. Either this are a bad thing, and you may experience some data loss.

Also - check out this site - near the bottom - some tips for ASR...

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm

Good luck, let us know how it turns out...

$.02

After talking with the company I bought it from, they decided the problem was a corrupted OS and they sent me a replacement hard drive. So far so good. It is puzzling, though, because I just got the thing in July....

Yeah, you would see a harddrive fail in that amount of time. The same with RAM.

Good to hear they fixed it up for you though.

I worked on alot of those Thinkpads. Best thing I found to do is to just load the OS and the device drivers. The Thinkpads come preloaded with a bunch of crap on them. Eliminate that and they are really nice pc's. Glad you got er fixed........