Re: Blank display after Welcome screen - cold boot

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As a follow up, everything is fine is I put the PC into hibernation over night.

Weird.

Lumpy wrote:
This is my problem: when cold booting, usually after the PC has been switched off for a while (hours, not days), everything appears to be fine during the boot sequence. However, when the welcome screen appears, the word 'Welcome' cannot be seen. Instead, there is a series of black squares (like when a font doesn't contain the characters you've typed).

When this welcome screen disappears, the screen goes blank, and the computer appears to hang. There is no mouse cursor visible, but there is continual disc activity.

Pressing control+alt+delete has no effect, and I am forced to restart the PC by pressing the reset switch.

The PC will then restart as usual, with the welcome screen displaying correctly.

This began to happen shortly after installing a Connect3D ATi Radeon 9550 graphics card with 256MB memory. At first, I thought it was a problem caused by a corrupt Windows XP installation (I'd been having other problems), but a fresh install on a new hard disc has the same issues, so it's not necessarily a Windows issue.

The graphics card appears to be working fine, other than this boot problem, 99% of the time. Occasionally, when working with graphics or video, the PC will freeze, the screen will go black, and the monitor reports no input signal. Other then that, there are no problems.

I have updated the graphics drivers to the the latest available from ATi (catalyst 6.3), and Windows is up to date (WinXP Pro, SP2, all updates up to today).

Antivirus is Avast Home Edition. All connections (mouse, keyboard, etc) are firmly seated.

I like a lean and mean system, so use M Lin's Startup Control Panel and Startup Monitor to ensure only essential apps and drivers are running at startup. (see www.mlin.net for info on these apps).

Any ideas? Thanks in advance,

Lumpy
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