This laptop would even get to the bios screen.

Occasionally, it would boot into Vista normally, but usually, it would just show a black screen with a short grey line in the top-left of the screen.

The laptop is a HP Pavillion.

At first, I pull out the battery and power, push the power button a few times, then re-attach the battery and power.

This works for many non-starting computers… but not in this case.

Next I try removing the HDD. It felt quite warm, so it might have been close to failure. But removing the hard drive doesn’t make any difference.

At this stage, I can only remove the 2 usb devives: a wireless mouse, and a the HP Officejet 8500A printer.

Now the laptop will boot every time.

I quickly find that its the printer thats preventing the laptop from starting.

I’ve seen a similar problem before, and I suspect that the cause is tha laptop trying to boot from the printer.

I find that once the laptop freezes, I can just remove the printers USB cable for a few seconds, and the laptop starts booting normally. I can then re-insert the printer USB cable, and everything works as it should.

Given time constraints, I wasn’t able to find a permanent fix to this problem… but pulling out the USB cable is good enough.