I have a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1545, which is almost exactly 2 years old. On it, we have Windows 7, which we always use, and Ubuntu, which we never use. There’s a my side and a my husband’s side. I’m not sure what to call that, but it’s like we have two different computers with different programs in one box. It was working fine up until yesterday.
In the morning, I came in and opened up the computer to see a blue screen with white text about “If this it he first time you have seen this screen don’t panic” and then I hit a key by acciendt so I didn’t get to read the rest. It restarted and worked fine for an hour.
Last night, Mr. HennaDancer was on his side and Firefox suddenly closed on him, but everything else was fine. He took that as a cue to go to bed and handed me the computer. I closed his side and chose the icon to open mine. Normally there’s half a second of black, then my stuff opens. The screen went black… and then nothing. It’s not the computer-off black, but the screen is working but doens’t have anything to display black. The arrow cursor was there and I could move it around just fine. I waited several minutes and tried ESC, enter, the Windows button, all to no effect. I tried CTRL-Alt-DEL and no response when tapping the Del or holding it down for several seconds at a time. I shut it down with the power button. I left it off a few minutes, then powered back up, and I got the choose which OS you want screen as usual, and chose Windows as usual, and got the Resume Windows as usual, then… black. I could do nothing except move the cursor arrow. I tried this shutdown a couple more times, waiting a few minutes in between. Same result.
I tried again, but this time chose Ubuntu instead of Windows. It came right up. I couldn’t log in as apparently I have forgotten my password, but otherwise I think it was running fine.
I restarted and ran Memory Test. Worked fine. At the end of that (all clear) I tried Windows again. Same story.
This morning, I got up to find that my husband had already been on and apparently had logged in. I switched to my side and got in with no problems. I’m on it now. No issues whatsoever.
I’m tempted to think that I just pissed it off somehow and now it’s over itself, or chalk it up to gremlins, but I’m not sure this is something I should ignore. Any thoughts on what could have happened that would go away on its own?
It doesn’t sound like anything a normal working copy of Windows would do. If it doesn’t happen again that’s good but it would definitely not hurt to check your computer for malware with malwarebytes antimalware. And after that whether it finds something or not and removes it check your startup list for rogue programs that you don’t know about like asdf3we.exe or something like that. If it does happen again after you’ve done these 2 things I would go for a system restore.
My first thought is a hardware problem, like overheating. You might want to get a can of compressed air and blow the dust out of it.
When you say “side” do you mean “user account”? You have a “user account” and he has a “user account”? Other than that I don’t know what you mean by “his side” or “my side”.
If you normally use Fast User Switching, I’d suspect it’s some application that’s subtly incompatible with that feature. (And there are a lot, unfortunately.) But restarting should have fixed that, so…
Yah I’m stumped.
This sounds very much like an unactivated copy of Windows going dark.
OP states that the one machine runs both Winders and Linux. So I interpret “my side” and “his side” to mean two separate disk partitions with the two systems on them, and a boot-loader (perhaps one of the Linux loaders, grub or lilo) with dual-boot menu.
Is that correct, OP?
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’m unsure.
When we log in to Windows, two icons come up, his and mine, and we pick one or the other, and each have our own preferences and programs, although some do share.
We had one listing for each of us when I opened the Ubuntu yesterday, too, so I think it’s the same there. Must get rid of that, as we never use it and it’s taking up space.
Okay, I just re-read the OP. It’s pretty clear, actually. You have two distinct separate operating systems (Windows and Ubuntu), and in each of them, you have two separate user accounts, one for each of you. But sorry, I don’t have a better answer for your hide-and-seek problem than some of the ideas already posted.
shut it down each time instead of putting it to sleep. My .02 worth, You probably have a driver or some other task that is flipping out on being hibernated and not wanting to snap back out. I have fixed a couple of these just by hard resetting a couple times until you get an option to “Resume” or “discard resume data and boot windows normally”. Select "discard the resume/hibernation data, boots normally.