Restored to Factory but now black screens with blinking cursor

I have an Acer Aspire 3515-2326 with Vista Home that I had to do a complete restore via the Alt-F10 method. I could not burn a recovery disk.

It went through all the motions of restoring and restarted to finish. When it restarted, I got the white Acer splash screen, then just a black screen with the blinking cursor.

I can do F2 at the prompt to access the bios during the splash screen but that seems to be it. I cannot go to F8 to get Advanced Boot Options as someone else suggested.

Do I need a Vista disk to do a repair?  If so, I'm outta luck.

Lol! I think you meant Disk.

Anyway, looks like the website doesn't have actual downloads, but what to search for on a torrent or MSDN, unless I'm just not reading it right. I don't have an MSDN account.

Ok that is easier. Thank you for that.

OK I discovered that it wasn't needing to do a repair disk after all. Apparently, if its been running any length of time to warm up, it wont restart till its sat a while. If I try to restart too soon, it goes to the blinking cursor on a black screen again.

In the time it took to create the vista ISO, the laptop cooled off enough and worked.

What the heck, is this common? Ive never heard of this before. So I assume I should take it apart and blow it out? It does get rather warm towards the back .

Ah, Thermal paste. I will give it a shot. Thanks.

And that typo made my day yesterday. I needed a laugh.

Cheers.
 

Just wanted to follow up on the overheating issue.

Opened up the laptop and it was not dirty, fins were not blocked.

Googled 5315 overheating and found its a common problem in that model. A Bios update (1.45) has helped to keep it cooler than it was.

(I wont throw away my Blue Ice packs though, just in case. Its how I got it to cool down enough to boot windows earlier).

Yes they are working.
 

You mean I should stop taking it into the shower with me?

Ya I got ya. lol