I’ll try to make a long story as short as possible:
I have a Dell PC laptop, running Windows XP. A good friend wanted to borrow it this weekend, reluctantly I agreed.
I sent a few emails from home last night, no problems. Shut down as normal & unplug it & walk it over to friend’s place, no drops and I don’t think a whole lot of jostling.
Elapsed time 30 min. Plug machine into his powerstrip, boot up, normal Dell powering-up screen followed by normal Windows XP booting up screen. Then screen goes black & I hear the Windows welcome jingle. Screen just black. Turn computer off with double Ctrl-Alt-Del. Repeat with same result. Turn off with plug out, battery removed. Battery back in, same result. Plug in, reboot, same result.
Attach friend’s monitor to my machine, Windows boots up normally on his screen w/o prompting. Files appear intact (whew!). Run a couple programs, seems normal. Audio comes out of my machine normally.
Take laptop home. Plug in, boot up and shut down in various combos, same result: black screen.
Caught Windows boot ups with function key break-ins to run diagnostic tools (I don’t have lot of experience with this but it seemed fairly straightforward). All sorts of pretty colors and patterns on screen, proper colers etc… No problems, told repeatedly hardware working fine. Reboot, get to when my desktop should pop up again and… black screen.
I’m borrowing a monitor this weekend to try and A) back-up any non-archived files to avoid disaster and B) try and fix the problem by looking at the seperate screen. Apparently my machine works (thanks be!), it just won’t let me watch it work…
When I have the monitor, what are some things I can try to do to get video back? That’s my question. I should be able to hit the web this weekend with the borrowed monitor (and tomorrow from work!) to read replies…
A friend of a friend in an IT dayjob gave a phone diagnosis that maybe there was a power surge (thudnerstorm when I plugged computer in friend’s place) the power strip didn’t handle that made things FUBAR , and I was lucky not to lose all my data.
Thank you very much in advance for any possible answers. I’m also curious at to what the cause of this might be; I certainly didn’t play around with any display settings on purpose.