Laptop Wont Boot

I have a Inspirion 1520 and I cannot get it to boot> When I start up my system it goes to System recovery but it wont Recover. I have tried to go back to System Factory settings and it runs then I get an error message. I do not want to call Dell support yet and pay a fee if I can get some feedback here first. I am running Windows Vista and I just purchased Windows 7 but have not had a chance to upgrade since my computer has been acting temperamental. Any help would be appreciated.