Windows XP freezes at initial description/setup screen, keyboard and mouse frozen too

what do you call the initial screen?, the POST screen, or the WinXP boot logo?

the first screen that tells you the computer brand,processor type etc....

Ok, a few things...

Post your system specs in your profile. the more information you can give about your system the better, including motherboard make and model, etc.

2, the Power On Self Test happens in a particular order (I apologise if you know this, but I have no way of telling whether you do or not).

First, you get graphics card info on some machines, this is followed by a new screen.

On this new screen, you get the name of the bios or whatever usually at the top. It then goes on to test your memory.

Below this, your IDE drives are detected one by one in the order Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, and Secondary Slave.

A new screen is produced, on which is a table of boxes showing IRQ information and the likes. The POST is then finished and the computer goes on to load the operating system.

Where in this process does the monitor freeze, and when it freezes, is it only the display picture, or does the computer's activity stop with it?

My apologies for the question and answer session, but you've given us all very little to work with, so we will all need a little bit more information to try to help you.

sounds like it's hanging on a sickly hard drive to me.

could be the memory.

heck, for all I know it could be that the keyboard is still unplugged and he's using a hacked BIOS that doesn't like it, but yes, I'd say that the hard drive was one possibility.

I just joined this forum because I have a similar problem. two weeks ago my Dell Dimension, XP Home Edition, PC froze at startup. I've been using this PC for 3+ years without incident. Dell worked on it for 4 days with me on the phone and could not fix the problem. I then went to Best Buy and purchased a new tower unit and a new laptop for my wife. After the tower unit was working fine for 3 or 4 days it also froze on startup. It looks like it is booting up but then flashes a screen for about 1 second and then it freezes with a black screen. Best Buy's Geek Squad Techs. have been working on this problem and have spent 4 hours at my home. The last time they got the system up and running and it looked good. I did my email on the system and shut it down normally. the next morning (yesterday) I got up and pushed the power button and the system froze in the same manner. I considering returning the system to Best Buy but would rather have it fixed. BB is being great about responding. A tech is supposed to come out again today. Any ideas ????
rich

Frozen keyboard at XP setup screen

I had this same issue with mine and the problem was what I had plugged in.

My USB keyboard was plugged into another USB device (that let me control 2 computers with 1 keyboard and mouse) and it was at this device where the keyboard was failing. As soon as I plugged my keyboard directly into my PC it worked fine.

Anyone else with this problem look at this.

Bad hard drive... The magnetic material is bubbling off the first eight sectors on the outer edge of one of the platters.
Time to replace the drive. You can probably use that drive for data, but not to boot, for some time yet... but it is toast.

Same issue here. wasn't the kvm switch. shouldn't be the power supply since it's new. my guess is the video card is going bad, i'll post again when i try out a new one.

Any PCI device can cause it... Often times removing and reseating it is enough to get rid of the problem, at least temporarily.

problem solved

yep, it ended up it was the video card. i did the math.... 50,000+ hours on it, not bad i guess. tried the wiggle test which got me another few hours out of it, but it quickly gave up. on a side note, when it caused xp to crash it would take me into the BIOS on reboot and gave me a message saying something about an incorrect processor speed setting. whatever, it's all good now.

Thanks for the informative update.