TheReasonIFail Posted December 1, 2009 Share Posted December 1, 2009 (edited) OK, I've been reading about this whole big "Black Screen of Death" deal that's been going around supposedly caused by some Windows Updates.Well, I have a PC that is exhibiting a black screen after the XP splash screen. I initially thought it was freezing but I later noticed that the PC was still running and I was able to connect to it via RDP login and check things out, which I couldnt' find anything wrong.I'm also able to login at the laptop by enabling vga mode but changing the resolution to anything about 800x600 brings the black screen back which tells me it's a video issue, uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers doesn't resolve the issue.The laptop is a Dell Precision M90 using a nVidia Quado FX 1500M GPU. The latest drivers are from 2007.Any way I can verify that the graphics card has gone bad? Edited December 1, 2009 by TheReasonIFail Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tripredacus Posted December 3, 2009 Share Posted December 3, 2009 If the card was bad, it wouldn't matter if you were in Windows or not. Either you wouldn't get video at all, or say it would be flakey in the BIOS too. If you think maybe the video cuts out after the notebook is running for x amount of time, or reaches a certain heat threshold, you can try other methods to see if you lose video. Try booting it to PE media. I know you've got them! Or even another type of LiveCD, such as a Linux which would actually let you play a movie or load 3D graphics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted December 3, 2009 Share Posted December 3, 2009 If you've got a black screen and ctrl-alt-del doesn't work at any res higher than 800x600, consider a linux live-CD to test. If you have problems there as well, it's definitely a hardware (not driver) issue, although if the liveCD works you might just be able to boot your XP CD and do a repair install to get back to normal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rippie_DK Posted December 3, 2009 Share Posted December 3, 2009 Have you tried to do a system restore back to before you installed the Windows Update ? As far as i have heard this is very well caused by an MS update, although MS denies it.Rippie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted December 4, 2009 Share Posted December 4, 2009 The update is caused because at some point in the past, the registry entry for launching explorer.exe as the desktop has been corrupted in such a way that the data is there, but cannot be read once the updates change security slightly. Prevx has a utility to fix this, but this black destkop issue would not go away at a lower resolution like it does for the OP, hence this is not the same issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheReasonIFail Posted December 6, 2009 Author Share Posted December 6, 2009 Well, I was able to fix the problem by logging in to the desktop via RDP and updating the video drivers!!Yay for easy fixes!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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