A lad i know has a problem with XP...

He tries to boot up the comp and when he does, it gets past the XP splash screen and then all he gets is a blank, black screen.

It can boot into safe mode, with no problems, but not normal mode...

he thinks the last thing he installed was the Windows Messenger Live program and after that it no longer worked.

any suggestions?







ps.










i hate windows.  

boot in safe mode and use rollback if he has it turned on.  

Failing that its time to drop the XP disk in and run an automated repair.  

its a tiny therefore i have a strong feeling he doesnt have an XP disk, believe it or not.  

had do you do a rollback? ive not used XP in about 3 years.  :?

^^^ what he said

the restore thing didnt work...

tried to uninstall messenger, but it didnt work...

no restore/xp disk either...

so i might have to ask him to get hold of one [xp disk] from somewhere and reinstall it.  

Providing someone has one available and the compy has the original M$ serial number sticker there should be no problem. He will need the drivers for the bits tho.

As I had this identical problem a couple of weeks ago this should work. Boot into safe mode, uninstall the video drivers, allow it to reboot into normal windows and then install the drivers again. There may be artefacts still there but they disappeared after faffing on.

Remember to tell him about tekforums

Quote from: Serious

Providing someone has one available and the compy has the original M$ serial number sticker there should be no problem. He will need the drivers for the bits tho.

As I had this identical problem a couple of weeks ago this should work. Boot into safe mode, uninstall the video drivers, allow it to reboot into normal windows and then install the drivers again. There may be artefacts still there but they disappeared after faffing on.

He shouldnt even need to have the drivers providing he just does an ASR or a simple install over the top to restore whatever system files got naffed up.

If the second bit is right then the VGA driver is corrupted and an install over wouldnt work, I tried that when I had the same problem. Simple way is to remove and reinstall the driver according to my second suggestion which is how I managed it.