I have a laptop I'm working on for a friend. It's loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. Here's what happening. When you power up, it will go through windows is loading files then get to the blue background with leaves and a white bird with a movable cursor. There are no icons and the taskbar is missing. Right clicking doesn't work and ctrl-alt-del doesn't bring up anything. First thing I do is try to boot into safemode with F8. That doesn't work, can't bring up the safemode menu at all. I don't have the Windows 7 install disk so I tried a Windows 7 recovery disk to access restore/repair options. That doesn't work either. It boots from the cd but gets stuck right after the windows asking to choose the keyboard layout. Same screen and symptom as booting from the hard drive. I've spent a couple hours searching google but can't find a solution. Thanks for any help you can provide.

The screen you describe, blue background with leaves and a white bird with a movable cursor, is the Windows 7 Logon screen. There are no icons nor taksbar because Windows is not fully booted up; it is stopping before it does a full boot up. There are any number of things that can give you this problem such as a bad section on the hard drive, a corrupted driver files, etc. If this laptop came with Windows 7 installed on it, the best thing to do is take it in for warranty service. All brand name computers come with a warranty by the manufacturer included in the price. Full support, including trouble shooting of the hardware and Windows 7 is the sole responsibility of the manufacturer. See info @ http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/help/contact-support Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.