We are having problems with an Asus netbook running W7 Home Premium.

When we turn it off (by screen click or power button), it seems to be not fully closing down. It seems that it might be going into hibernation or sleep or something because an indicator light on the corded USB mouse stays on, which shouldn’t happen. If we turn it off by a long push on the power button, the same thing happens.

When the power button is pushed to turn it on, the Starting Windows message shows on the screen, the animated W7 logo shows and after a while the W7 start-up sound plays. Then the screen goes near-black but there seems to be a bit of backlight on it, and the hard-drive indicator winks for quite a while and then slows down. Nothing further happens and W7 does not go any further and screen stays blank and dimly lit.

I am thinking that the settings for awake v. hibernation v. sleep are all up the pole. The power saving settings in Control Panel are all set on ‘never’.

It is possible to start the laptop in Safe Mode but apart from that it is now virtually useless because it won’t boot unless in Safe Mode.

It has recently been upgraded from a beta-type version of W7 to a legit version of Home Premium but had these symptoms prior to the upgrade. The old W7 is still on the hard drive showing as ‘windows.old’. My gut feeling is that the upgrade did not cause any of this but the problem is now worse than it was (at least it would start before). A MS technician in their Philippines call centre talked me through the upgrade and he was the one who suggested that the power saving settings were at fault. He changed them to ‘never’ because he thought it was going into hibernation or sleep instead of turning off.

I hope I have described this OK. I am at the outer limit of my techiness on all this and would be very grateful for any comments or suggestions.