i had a Gateway laptop that has problems when i boot it up. While on a business trip, i packed it away in my luggage and now when i power it on, the screen is almost too dark to see anything. it also gets stuck in a loop when it powers on and continuously restarts itself without running any programs prior to restarting. anyone have any suggestions for me?

Hello drunkpunk000

Have you tried adjusting the brightness controls on the laptop? usually the Fn+up arrow combination.
At what point does the system restart? do you have time to do anything prior to it shutting down?

ive tried to adjust the brightness controls and it does not work and it really gives no time to do anything else.after it sits on the windows 2000 pro screen for about 10min(literally) it goes black and restarts. i think it says something on this black screen but there is no way of seeing the print with the screen the way it is.

Can you boot the laptop into safemode?

I had this problem once on an IBM thinkpad. Turned out to be riddled with viruses. Run an anti virus program on it...McAfee is real good. Circular rebooting was my problem too. This happened on my laptop before I put in an antivirus program.
It had such virus infection, even my geek friends couldn't rehabilitate the disk. I wound up wiping the entire disk and starting all over. Hope your problem is not so drastic. I'm betting you have a virus....get lasted updates in virus program.

Another thought...do you have a "system restore" option on that computer which will re install your default system files?

You might lose some after installed programs but at least the laptop will boot correctly when restored.

Another thought: go into the bios on attempted boot (see directions on screen) then change the boot sequence in the bios so you can boot first from either a cd with system files or an "a drive"...if your laptop doesn't have an a drive you can get a drive which you can plug into the usb...then put a "system boot disk", which you hopefully have into the a drive and have the bios boot from the a drive first. Once it boots up, you can get in safe mode and find out what the heck went wrong.