PC won't boot up

I’ve run into a bit of a snag. My Windows 7 32-bit machine gets stuck at the login screen, but it’s totally unresponsive. I can move the mouse around, but I can't click anything—no user login prompt shows up at all. Every ten seconds or so, the screen just flickers, and the mouse cursor hangs for a couple of seconds like it's trying to process something, then it just resets. I tried booting into Safe Mode, but that didn't work either. We even pulled the hard drive to test it, and everything seems fine there. I also tried running the built-in repair options from a Windows 7 boot disk and reset the BIOS to defaults, but nothing has helped. Any ideas?

Well, if you've already tried running those Windows repair tools and they didn't do the trick, then something has clearly gone sideways deep in the system. My suggestion? Grab a Linux Mint live USB, burn it, and boot from that—it's a lifesaver. Once you're up and running, just move all your important files over to an external drive or a thumb drive. After your data is safe, you'll pretty much have to wipe the hard drive completely and perform a fresh installation of Windows.