My thinkpad will not boot up. What can I do? It's the 2888.

What exactly is happening and how far into the boot process is it getting ?
Have you checked the power ?

Rebooting is the process of powering down and powering back up. Is that what you are trying?

If you have lost the Operating system then it will fail to boot and keep attempting until it does boot. But if parts are missing it will never make it to the OS. We need an exact description of what's going on to help you.

It shut off I turned it back on but all it does is run through all these diferint numbersthen it goes to the page how would you like to startup.. safe mode then it keeps going back to the first thing and goes through the numbers again/n again/over and over..

What happens when you select Safe Mode ?

@curlyben.it does not load it keeps goimg back to the same screen or it goes to ummthrough the ram like its on repeat..

Sounds like your OS got borked. Do you know anyone with a startup disk for your OS? You may be able to repair it with the disk.

I don't know anyone with a startup disk.

Some PC's have a hidden recovery partition on them that will set you back to factory defaults. The problem is you will lose all your saved data, pictues, and music in the process. All PC's are not the same, sometimes there will be a short dialog at boot up that tells you what key to press to get into settings (bios) or utilities (diagnosis and possibly factory reset). Common keys are the DEL key for bios and F2 F11 or F12 for other functions. But the first thing I would try is to use the F8 key to get to your safe mode screen (or from your description it ends up there automatically) and try selecting "last known good configuration".
Also I have seen desktops (and I would assume laptops too) fail to boot when the motherboards battery goes dead. The battery keeps settings in the cmos like date and time as well as boot sequence and others. The battery is easy to replace in a desktop, but since I have never owned a laptop I would suspect it would reside behind a removable door under the unit. It should read 3 volts on a volt ohm meter.

My sister inlow sent it out to a repair shop it is her laptop and she did not want to wait to see if I could fix it so she is going to spend the money to have it fixed. I found that it was in the middle of a update for service pac 2 and her child shut it off or unpluged it n that's how it got messed up..

That will do it. Glad you got back to us to let us know.