I’ve had a few problems with my new Laptop – they appear to have started when I upgraded from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate.  But, now I’ve fixed it so I’ll pass on my experiences.

The install wasn’t quite smooth and said it had failed – but on a restart, everything seemed OK.

However, I started to see the blinking cursor on some startups.  The initial BIOS startup worked, showed a blinking cursor for half a second then carried on and finally, without showing any Windows startup, settled on the blinking cursor again.  And there it stayed.

Using Ctrl-Alt-Del made it startup normally.

The problem didn’t occur after a Sleep, but did after Hibernate.  I also found that waking up from Hibernate lost the stored session sometimes – really annoying.

I searched for a solution (finding some alarming comments about broken Hard Disks) and nothing worked.

However, I did come across some advice about repairing the boot sector to fix it – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/startup-repair.

Now, this might have worked given the way I appear to have fixed it:

I installed Windows 8 Pro.  And now the problem has gone away (touch wood…).  Which seems to fit with the advice in the Microsoft article.

So, not quite the fix you may have wanted, but the above link may solve the problem.