My wife has a six year-old Toshiba Satellite laptop, which is her baby, and has functioned w/o problem to this point.  The computer was used mainly for email and occasionally surfing. She decided to go into the bios and change settings, trying to speed it up.  It was running XP home and now it won't even power up. Where should I begin looking to alleviate this problem. I'm assuming I'll have to replace, at the very least, the hard drive, but would appreciate any pointers.

Thanks in advance for any ideas, suggestions or pointers.

J. R.   

Hi J.R.

   If the laptop worked perfectly fine before she starting changing settings in the bios, and stopped starting right after, then the computer hardware itself is probably fine, it is just the bios settings that are bad.  I doubt anything needs to be replaced. (Assuming there weren't other issues that caused her to start tinkering in the bios.)

What you generally do in this case it to clear the bios and put it back to factory settings.  There are a few ways to do this, but unfortently with laptops it is tricky.  If you can still get into the bios itself, there should be a restore option in there, if not you have to fix this issue directly on the motherboard.  There are two ways generally to fix this on the motherboard.  One is to flip a pin, and another is to remove the cmos battery and put it back in.  Those are described here: http://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Your-BIOS

Those both require direct access to your motherboard, which means taking your laptop apart.  This can be tough in laptops, and you need to be careful not to damage it further.  If this is not something you are comfortable doing, you could have a computer tech do it (If we did it, I would expect the cost to be under $100.  Spending that much money on a older computer may not be worth it though.)

Good luck.