Somehow the only computer I have at home as decided to give me a blank screen. Since I do not have it in front of me most of this comes from memory.
I have a Tosibia laptop that is running Win98. I went to install a game and it told me that it needed to be in 16 colors to run and if I wanted to it would do it for me. So like a dope I did it. now the screen comes up blank when it starts Windows. I have run it with a startup disk, but for Win95 I do not have the startup for 98, and it didn’t help. The screen works as it shows the startup screen fine, but once the log-in screen comes up it goes blank. What can I do to fix this I would like to have my computer back.
Try a registry restore. When it’s booting up, start tapping the F8 key before Windows ever starts. You should come up to the boot menu. One of the choices (number 5 I think) is ‘command prompt.’ Select that and it should take you to an a: or c:. If it’s a:, type in ‘c:’ (without the quotes) and hit enter to get to a c prompt. Then type ‘scanreg /restore’ and hit enter. You should get a blue screen with 4 dates showing started or not started. Don’t worry about the started/not started, just the dates. There are actually 5 registry dates listed. If you use your down arrow, you’ll find the 5th. Pick a date listed there when you know the computer was acting normally, and hit enter. Your system should then try to restore the registry and will tell you if it was able to or not. If so, reboot and cross your fingers. If not, scanreg /restore again and select another date.
Or, from the boot menu, select safe mode. This will start your computer in the default graphics mode. From there, you can go to the control panel and slect Display, which will allow you to set your graphics to whatever Toshiba recommends. Then restart.
I tried the F8 method and it did not take me to the boot menu. Is there another way to get it to come up? I guess I forgot to say that didn’t I? I know a bit about computers, enough to try that anyway. I will try again tonight.
You need to “tap” the F-8 key repeatedly during boot up at 1/3 to 1/2 second intervals , not hold it down. On some systems you may need to try this this a few times before it takes.
You really need to boot into safe mode and correct video there . Booting into DOS and re-setting the registery will probably work but it’s the long way around.