I received a newer dell laptop, Windows Viata 3 gigs of ram ,maybe 4 to 5 mnths old. The girl said yesterday it was working fine until windows installed something. So the problem is when you turn the computer on it looks like it is booting up normal and WAM!! the screen goes blank. I can start it in safe mode. I ran spy sweeper, anti virus, deleted all temp files, even tried to use system restore and nothing worked. Any suggestions?
can you roll it back to a restore point like you can with XP?
Nope, tried that. I think Ill have to throw the disk in to see if I can recover that way.
My rule of thumb is that if it takes more than 2 hours to 'repair' a computer, I back up the data files (if possible) and reinstall the OS.
Your case could be a corrupt video driver; try rolling it back from device manager or reinstalling from the Dell driver CD. Check the boot log and event log -- may or may not be revealing. If the computer is still under warranty and you can boot in safe mode with networking you can call Dell and have them connect remotely for troubleshooting. You can uninstall the most recent Windows Update files. Lots of options.
My clients are happiest when I get the computer working again; they really don't care whether I figured out what the problem was, which can take hours if not days if not infinity ;-)
Back up, back up, back up. If you're ever faced with a reinstall you'll have a nice, clean, fast computer (for a while) and all your data.
Good luck!
Well I looked over the log and found a lot of error boot bcd error 94. I googled it and it did not look good. Ill try to use the recivery disk and if that does not work, here come kill disk.