Re: Sudden black screen

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

Sherrie wrote:
My husband is running Windows XP. For the past three or four months, he will be browsing or writing email and all of a sudden his screen goes blank and gray. The monitor is still on and working but there is nothing there. He can reset or reboot and everything comes back. At one time we thought it was going into hibernation because it would be working when he left it but when he came back an hour later the screen would be blank. We checked the power settings and hibernation and sleep mode are not turned on. When it started doing it while he was working on it we knew it wasn't hibernation.

Nothing makes it come back except restarting the computer. It's not the monitor because it looks like it does when the monitor is on but the computer is off. It has that gray glow. We thought it might be the new memory we installed but we removed it and reinstalled the old memory to see if it did it with the old memory. It did. When it's working it's working great but when it gets ready to quit it just quits. Any ideas?

What happens if you boot some other environment ?

For example, I have a Seagate hard drive. Seagate provides a downloadable
diagnostic, to test the hard drive. The software is provided to load on
a boot floppy. You could download and prepare a floppy like that, and
boot from it, just to have some OS to drive the screen for testing.
If the screen remains lit, running for long periods of time, then you'd
suspect your Windows install has some kind of issue. If that DOS boot
environment had similar issues, then you'd suspect hardware.

On the Windows side of things, you could check your Event Viewer, to
see if any errors are being logged (by the graphics driver perhaps).

Another thing you could try, is remoting into the defective machine,
and see what is going on while the screen is gray. It could be,
that the machine is still responsive to packets from the network,
and perhaps you can connect to it and check it that way. They
mention "Windows XP Professional", and if the Home version is
involved, there are likely other solutions similar to that.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/remoteintro.mspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop_software

You could try remoting in, before it goes gray. If it refuses to fail
that way, you can wait until it goes gray, and then attempt to remote in.

Paul
.

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