Aspire 5534 Not Starting Up

I've had my Aspire 5534 for a little over a year now and last night, while working in MS Word and researching online, the computer shut itself down and attempted to restart.  The only problem was, after the ACER screen came up, it did nothing but sit at a prompt screen.

I have been noticing some issues with it in the last few weeks such as going to a random website when I attempted to click on a specific link from Google and several times FireFox completely froze and the computer needed to be restarted.  I ran a virus check and it everything checked out and then yesterday evening this new problem happened.

I also have an Aspire One which appeared to do the same thing a few weeks ago (starting up but not booting Windows) and after searching some forums I found out that the BIOS needed to be updated from a USB.  Since I was able to get to the ACER startup screen on my 5534, I was able to to see that my BIOS is out of date; however, there aren't any instructions on how to update this from the USB.

If anyone has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.

Thanks for the reply.

I cannot get into Windows to perform a system restore.  I spoke with an IT guy from my job earlier today and he informed me that I should repeatedly press F8 upon startup and I will be given the option to start Windows in Safe Mode.  That, unfortunately, did not work.

Is there another way to perform a restore without entering Windows?  Sadly, I am not great with these things outside of the safety of an operating system environment.