[craigbenham]

I came over to my dad's this morning and was told there was a problem with his laptop. . . .

it appears to be caught in a loop half way through updating, when you turn it on it opens a windows vista home premium page displaying the message:

'Configuring updates: stage 3 of 3 0% complete, Do not turn off the computer'

then it shuts down, restarts and returns to this page. It continues to do this over and over again.

I have tried starting in safe mode, stays stuck in the loop, tried putting the product recovery disk in, cannot find a way to run it. have tried hitting F8 when starting up and going through the repair options but it cannot find what is wrong. tried starting at the last known good configuration but that didn't help either.

Don't know if this is anything to do with it but have had 'tray appt' windows coming up for a while and they are hard to get rid of (i think they are to do with the hp printer)

My dad insists all he did was let the battery run down then try to switch it back on. I'm hoping some1 may have a clue what he has done?

[Spencer2004]

you need to boot your vista disk at startup, go into your bios (del at startup) then locate your boot options and place your cd drive at the top. then you can go through the repair process from there. what was your dad doing when it happened? was he updating to the new service pack or just doing a regular update? if not it may be a virus and will probally require a reinstalliation of windows or a profession to change some regestry settings or something

[serverguy]

I think we need to suggest a complete reinstall yet!

Is this XP or Vista?

If it is Vista have a look at this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...=en-us&m=1&p=1