Windows refusing to boot

[numark]

I have a Windows XP installation on a standard black-box Dell, and when I came home today, the computer had shut itself off. I turned it back on, and it loaded up Windows, go to the "Welcome" screen, then shut itself off again. Attempting to boot into Safe Mode causes it to reboot sometime after all of the device drivers are loaded, but before the display comes up. I've tried to boot it about 4 times now and it still keeps on causing problems. Does anyone have any idea what I might be able to do next, or maybe has had the same problem? Thanks!

 

[thegorx]

if there was a power surge you might have to reset the motherboard
other than that and if it just shut itself off, this is not good and is serious attempting to run it without finding the cause can cause further damage.

other possible causes I can think of off hand, over heating and bad capacitors
open the case and look for leaking or bulging capacitors
on Dells I've worked with look mostly at the large capacitors next to the CPU socket
if they look fine, check your fan and heat sink

also now that I think of it the Dell power supplies have been know to have bad capacitors as well.

you can try running chkdsk to see if perhap the original shutdown caused data corruption but like I said before, if your computer shuts down by itself you need to find the cause.