My friend just downloaded drivers for his video card. They where right from the Nvidia site and for the right card and everything.

After it installed it told him to restart, which he did but when it booted back up the screen was black. It didn't turn on at all.

Cant get to BIOS or safemode, well maybe he can but the screen is black so you wouldn't know.

 

Tomorrow... er.. today he will be coming over and try to plug it in to a monitor to check if the screen is just fried and its really bad timing or if there is truly a problem with the drivers.

 

So if it is the driver how do we fix this? not being able to see and all...

Plug a different GPU in, start it uninstall the drivers for the other GPU then plug it in, then reinstall the driver that worked with it.

 

Also shouldn't unplugging the GPU automatically make it use the onboard graphics?

forgot to mention... its a laptop...

 

so idk how graphics cards work in them... but ill try that if i can find it

Laptop GPU as far as I know isn't exactly replaceable... or take out able

 

I'm not saying it can't be but most don't as far as I know.

I figured....

so any idea of what to do know

 

a friend said might have to reformat, would be a bit hard with out being able to see it though...

So i have some new info!

 

When you plug a monitor in you can get it to work in safemode.

If you try to run it in normal mode the screen turns black after the loading windows thing is done.

Before this he wasn't able to use it in normal either because the screen would just be a bunch of colors

the startup isnt right either... it flashes some [cabbage] things, it may be text but its too fat to realy tell. then if you hit F8 the menu for booting comes up.

 

Also once in awile it says you sould system restore when you start up. If you do it nothing changes

 

I think that it i whipe all the graphics drivers on it and install new ones it will work. Im not too sure how to delete the old ones though.

 

any ideas?

Okay you may have two problems here, and I need for you to clarify something:

 

Firstly un-plug the external monitor and then turn the laptop on. Do you get any image on the laptop screen, look closely and If you get a very slight faint image (you may have to look VERY closely) then it is likely that a module in the screen itself called an inverter has died, this provides the back light to the screen. You should take it to a laptop repair specialist and get them to replace it, inverters are usually not very expensive.

 

Now because you are getting garbled images on the screen AND file corruption when loading windows, then it is pointing towards an intermittent memory problem. The laptops GPU shares a bit of the main system RAM, and if one of the sticks of memory is failing then this will effect both the GPU and windows files such as the registry when it gets loaded into memory. So you should mention this to the people you get to repair it.