Packard bell tj61 laptop will not start

Hello,
I have been left with my daughter's laptop to 'fix'. It blue-screened and then would not even start other than a couple of seconds when power light etc would show up. Eventually got it open in safe mode (not sure how) and got option to run startup repair. That seemed to go well......restarted beautifully, said system configuration had changed and could be reason. Error code 0x0. Got in to account and all seemed fine but needed to restart for windows security files to be activated. It took ages to shut down......when it finally did I tried switching on again....and disaster....nothing other than beep and power light etc again. She has Vista Home Premium with Service Pk2 running. What can we do now? She said it can take quite a while of it to shutdown normally too. Need up and running for uni again asap. Pls help if any know-how the could help :-)