For the last few weeks now I've been experiencing a maddening, catastrophic intermittent fault with my Scaleo E Media Centre PC.

Whenever I try to start the PC up, the light comes on, as does the front panel, the fans all come on, and the HDD powers up, but nothing happens past that; it just sits there forever on a blank black screen. If I restart and restart the computer repeatedly sometimes it will get to the Fujitsu Semens boot-screen and hang there, but I usually have to restart a dozen times to get it to go that far.

On the rare occasion it does get past that screen it can hang when Windows is loading, when the little progress bar is scrolling left to right.

When, after MANY repeated attempts, it *does* actually start up and Windows gets running, it seems to be fine. Once or twice it froze during Windows after running for a while, but that's rare. It's as if once Windows gets up and running it's fine (usually). I've had it on for a couple of days without incident, but as soon as I shut down/hibernate/restart it all begins again.

I think this could be a problem regarding the post screen?

I've reset the BIOS to defaults, checked all the hardware and connections, and I'm quite frankly at a total loss.

It started off hanging on start up once every few times, but then seemed to get sicker over the course of a week or so, to the point where I have to spend 20mins trying to convince it to start up every time.

I just can't imagine what's going wrong here...

Sorry for the delayed reply.

It appears you have been in the case?

If so have you cleaned out all the dust? Cleaned the fans?

Also I 'd suggest running MemTest:

http://www.memtest.org/

Memtest would be the first thing to test. If that passes I would then suggest stripping the pc down as mich as possible. Remove all sticks of ram apart from one, try the PC if it still wont work then unplug the optical drives, try again, still wont work remove the graphics card and use the onboard video if you have one, unplug anything which isnt needed to boot up.

If it still wont work then I would suggest doing a full clean re install of Windows.

If it still happens you know it's a hardware problem.