need help with troubleshooting my Toshiba

[gdcollins]

My laptop won't boot pass the Windows Vista screen. It starts to login, then automatically log off

 

[Camar0ss]

If you can get into Safe Mode, it may be your only option to just do a factory restore on the laptop.

Before that though, are you running the most recent updates for Vista? I believe Service Pack 2 is the final pack for it. If you have all the updates and you're still having problems, you'll probably have little to no choice apart from a factory reset... But there is some good news that comes along with that as well. If you've got a bit of extra cash (and the hardware resources) you'd be much better off to simply upgrade to Windows 7 if you have to restore the operating system anyway. It'll take around the same amount of time (with minimal user input) to install Win 7 as it would to factory restore Vista, and you'd be losing all of your data either way.

If you CAN get into safe mode, try to salvage any photos, music, etc that you may want to keep onto a flash drive. But be sure to pre-scan all of the files before moving them off the flash drive onto any other PC's, as they may be infected or corrupted.