MY LAPTOP HAS STOPPED WORKING. - WHY??? Help!

[QuintessentialShadows]

My laptop is no longer working. All my files are gone. I need it for work.

Basically, I wanted to restart before going out, so hit restart from the windows start up menu, and went out. A few hours later, when I came back, there wast teh familiar "other people are connected to your pc, if you restart they will lose connection, restart?" I hit yes. This happens frequently and is nothing to worry about.

But, when it restarted there was briefly a message saying "Failure to initialize at login" Then it went black. I press the start button on the laptop, and on my screen I have a blue belt at the top and the bottom and narrow turquoise and green stripes vertically. Cant turn it on now.

Is everything lost?

Ever experienced anything like this?
(using dhs pc now)

Hard to know. Data may be recoverable from the drive (it should come out of the machine somehow).

However before getting to that stage, I would:

1. Disconnect power supply.
2. Remove the battery.
3. Wait a minute.
4. Insert Battery
5. Reconnect Power supply.
6. Turn on... does it go through book cycle?

Do you see anything at all?

meant Boot cycle

I have tried that approach you mention. Now nothing happens when I try to turn it on. I normally use it with an external flat screen monitor. It is the monitor that had this odd colouring, my laptop screen was just black. Now everything is black. But I can see that the lights that normally start flashing when I turn it on behave like they normally do. Hopefully it is just my screen that is gone. But if so, it should work when connected to external monitor?

When dh gets back (India for work) I am hoping he can connect direct to hard disc and see if he can extract data.

Could you try switching it back to using the integrated display. On some laptops FN F3 switches display. Look for an FN key on your keyboard, then look for the word Display written in small lettering under on of the keys (typically along top row).

Check the cable on the external monitor. Are the connector pins all straight for example, or has something got bent?

The lights flashing in normal sequence is a positive sign. Could indicate that all is well with the hard drive - so data should be safe.