Acer Laptop Won't Boot Past Title Screen

By Dan Falk

Computer troubleshooting
i Punk Businessman with Laptop Computer image by Scott Griessel from Fotolia.com

When your computer won't boot past the title screen or start-up screen, it usually means you have software problems or a virus. Almost all Acer computers come preinstalled with a Windows operating system, which allows you to troubleshoot the operating system before locking up during the start-up screen. Whether your problem is hardware or software-related, this technique allows you to access your desktop to retrieve all the items you want from your hard drive before completely reinstalling your operating system.

Click the power button. Within the first 10 seconds, a BIOS keystroke should pop up. The keystroke to access the BIOS is usually the "ESC"+"SHIFT" keys. "F8" is also an option for getting to the BIOS. After keying the keystrokes, the BIOS screen is displayed.

Navigate through the BIOS system, which is the first system that your computer accesses. The BIOS contains several commands and options to scroll through to modify various ways to start up your computer or reinstall the entire system. It contains the booting options of your computer.

Navigate to the desired option with the arrow keys and select "Start in Safe Mode." Safe mode is an operation your computer can run in which it doesn't use full capacity of your computer's hardware or software, but allows you to navigate to your computer's desktop and hard drive, regardless of an existing virus.

Restart your computer in Safe Mode and wait for it to boot. After navigating to your desktop, begin dragging and dropping any information you want to save onto an external hard drive or USB thumb drive before the virus corrupts the files.

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