My dad has had a dell laptop for between 6 and 12 months and yesterdat when he turned it on a blue screen came up saying windows was resuming and stayed like that for a couple of hours, I told him to shut it off completely and try it again this morning and the same thing, windows is resuming and stayed like that all day. My question:Is there a quick way to remedy this without having to send the laptop back to dell?
Do a chkdsk c: /f on the hard drive. That's what I would do first, if the computer was improperly shutdown previously some of the system files might have got corrupted. You need the vista installation dvd to use the command prompt. If the computer didn't come with the full vista dvd, you can get the repair section that can be burned to a bootable cd (made available for those with no installation dvd) http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD
Keep hitting F8 when restarting and say something like delete restoration data and restart. It should restart normally but he'll lose whatever he had open when he hibernated the machine.
Thanks for all the help, I did a cold reboot and it started up fine ( hold the power button for 5 - 10 seconds) turns out he didn't shut it down properly.