Touchsmart froze, hard reset, now wont boot

[avianoz]

Hello,

  I have a touchsmart iq770 desktop.  I was using my computer when it froze online watching tv.  I hard reset the computer, and the blue HP screen came up with the line of instructions across the bottom (i.e. press f 5 for this, press f 11 for that)...but would go no further.  If you touched the screen, it would beep, but nothing would happen.  Tried to reset again, but the scree just stayed black.  If you unplug everything for a little while, the computer will go further into the booting process, but never make it.  I have pressed f10, and made it to the bios page (where it froze one time) and reset to original settings, saved, exited....and got the black screen.  Unplugged, waited, reset and it still freezes at the blue HP screen, or shortly thereafter.  The words on the bottom of the blue HP page come up a little fuzzy or scrambled about half the time.  I opened the computer, disconected the memory card reader (I read in a forum that this would work, but it didnt) reset the ram, but it hasnt worked.  I bought one new stick of ram today, I am going to try and swap it out to see if that works.  I have not had any freezing problems prior to this, but it wont even start into safe mode.  It always freezes before windows is loaded.  Does anyone have any insight?  Thanks.

[avianoz]

Something else strange, now that I think about it, when the computer would make it from the blue HP screen to the black screen, there would be a 4 or 5 second gap where there was a black screen with a cursor flashing in the upper left hand corner, I never saw that before in boot up.  But it would make it past the blinking cursor every once in a while (depending on how long the computer has been unplugged it seems) so Im not sure if that means its a hardware problem.  Any thoughts?