I have a laptop running WinXP, and lately it's been having a huge problem.
Sometimes I lid being closed and the computer idle for some time (havent quite figured out how long, yet), and when I come back, I open the lid to a blank screen. On pressing the Esc key, the screen comes back, but it is simply black, with text asking to insert a system disk and press any key to continue. I tied putting in a boot disk to see what happens, but then the computer just hangs.

It may be related to another issue, but I'm not sure: A while ago, the user profile became corrupted or something... All the files were still present in the Documents and Setting folder, but on startup I got something about an I/O error in the windows registry, and it loaded a guest profile that I've been using ever since...

I hope someone can help...

What is the make & model of the laptop?

Do you have the manual & the Recovery Disk(s) that came with it?

er... It's a Toshiba, I forget the model. I can get it tommorrow...
No I don't have the recovery disks.

Can you boot into safe mode (F8 after BIOS/Toshiba Logo/ before XP)?

yeah.
Other than the problem I've described, it runs fine. I've still been using it for everything, it just annoys me that when it's left for too long, it crashes on me...
It is quite a long time too, something like an hour. I've disabled all hibernation/standby/had drive shutdown/monitor off etc, but it doesn't seem to do anything to help

Is it running on battery or wired or does it make a difference?

No battery. There's a hardware problem that means that batteries do not charge...


Hmmm... It's beginning to sound more littered with problems than I fists thought.
Still, it's running okay most of the time...

Toshiba has a pretty good support site here:
You need to know the model for details:
You can backtrack thru the site by clicking support on the tool bar:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ceghdgngdgmn.0