I have an Acer laptop that I have had for about one year now. I recently have encountered problems where my computer would shut down at random. I figured out it had to be due to heat issues - thus fan problems.

Then just yesterday this happened:
I was on it playing a game... I shut it down and let it charge and everything... I went to boot it up... it comes up with the Manufacturer's screen as usual.. then it goes to this black screen with white lettering saying its doing some sort of LAN check... then it gives me my MAC address and something else... then it pauses for a sec and another line down its says "Operating System Not Found"

I cannot boot with Safe Mode

I talked to one of my other friends who pretty much is a god with computers told me: "you need to have all of your fans working on a manufactured computer in order for it to work right or else it won't use the processor it will just go as far as POST w/o booting because i don't think that you need any processing power until you boot up an OS"

So, before I opened my laptop up, I wanted to get some input from my fellow D-A-L Computer Geniouses

is your laptop connected to a network?

I had the same problem with a mates laptop last year, if I remember correctly it was something to do with the hard drive.

I'd check the bios for a boot order, you might find it has boot from LAN in the list, if it does, it's try to find the OS. If it can't find it you'll probably find your hard drive has died.

It has been before, just not anytime during the day that it happened.

Why would there be something wrong in the boot order, how would it have changed? I started it up about 4 hrs prior to the malfuction and it started up as normally as any other Windows computer boots up.

I am going to go ahead and check out the fan, I sure hope that is the problem.