Reading other posts about bios problems i did the following without success...removed one stick of memory...post acknowledged that..removed battery, checked it and its good, and finally moved the cmos jumpers as suggested. I boot up and i finally am able to get to the boot tab, and for a brief second it looked empty, but before i could enter info the screen went black and the pc shutted off. i guess the only thing i accomplished was that its now in default mode, and yet not able to do anything about it.