Windows Vista won't load past start up screen

I apologize in advance for my illiteracy with computers. I don't know what happened in my situation. I'm running Windows Vista on an Acer Laptop w/ 1GB ram. My computer was running a bit slower than usual so I decided to attempt to restart it. After the computer tried to start up again, all I got was the start up black screen with the small grey blinking line in the top left. It stays at this screen and goes nowhere. It doesn't show any sign of progress and don't hear the computer running or attempting to anything at all. The fans work and the computer is on but it won't go anywhere past this screen. Any help at all would be great. Thank you for your time.

 

Shut down, power on laptop, tab a key printed on screen for SETUP/BIOS, load defaults, save & exit, tab F8 for safe mode, if all goes well, log in as admin, start, control..., dev mgr, make sure there's no examination mark, restart pc as normal. If that blanks the screen again, go back to safe mode, start, run, msconfig, clear box for startup items, restart pc.

 

I loaded up defaults in the BIOS and tried tabbing F8 when the POST screen comes up but it comes up with nothing. It stays at the POST screen without loading a single thing. Since I have Acer, it came with eRecovery when pressing alt+f10, but for some reason, trying to do a factory restore wouldn't even complete without an error. It is still stuck at the POST screen without doing a thing. Still, any help would be appreciated.

 

Go back to bios, change boot order to floppy, cd/dvd, hdd:

http://icrontic.com/images/mm/Articles/build_computer/bios/bios03.jpg

Your bios may look different.