Monitor frozen on "To interrupt normal post, press enter"

My brother game me a lenova computer. Vista operating system, and some free antivirus software.

I got a message from Security Essentials that I didn't like, and since I assumed it was just an antivirus program, I deleted it and installed Panda.

Then I got a message saying Activate Windows. It would go away after a few seconds, so I never clicked on it. Besides, Windows was working just fine.

Just put the computer to sleep, tried to wake it up, it wouldn't wake up.

Did a hard restart.

Now, the screen comes up with the message, To interupt normal post, press enter. I press enter, nothing happens.

The little green light that should flicker to indicate hard drive is churning away does not flicker.

I put in the System Restore disk, and hit F12, and now it gives me the "To interrupt normal ost, press enter.
Below that, the Entering boot menu

Finally after about 5 minutes the boot menu came up and I was able to boot it using the system recovery disk.

I'm used to a Mac reboot where it will just start up and show me the hard drive etc.

But what this boot disc wants to do is reinstall Windows entirely, which I don't want to do.

Is that my only option?

Thanks for any help.

(And yes, I'm a newbie and should not have been messing with things I know nothing about!)

And I see this message finally showed up. I'd posted it about 10 minutes ago, it never showed up, and in that time the computer had finally booted up of its own accord and it's now back to normal.

But for how long?

Start with these free diagnostics:

H/W Diagnostics:
Please start by running these bootable hardware diagnostics:
Memory Diagnostics (read the details at the link)
HD Diagnostic (read the details at the link)

Also, please run one of these free, independent online malware scans to ensure that your current protection hasn't been compromised: Malware (read the details at the link)

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