YELLAHEEP
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Littleton, Colorado
My HP PC is having issues and could use some direction/advice on how to attempt to fix it. I'll try to keep it as short/simple as possible.
O.S. is Windows Vista. (I know, I know, but surprisingly it's worked great for us for the last 2 years or so with NO issues until now.)
Current problem:
2 days ago, I used the computer 3 times during the day, each time simply waking it up from sleep mode with no problems. My wife went to wake it up that evening and she said it locked up with nothing on the screen. She powered it down, did a re-boot and now it won't "start up". She said a window popped up first time she powered it up that mentioned there was a system error regarding the graphics/video card, but she couldn't duplicate that window on subsequent power ups.
When you power it on now, there's all kinds of graphic issues on the monitor. First you see a black screen with the white letter dos-style prompts as normal, but that's overlayed with numerous large white cursor looking squares almost in a checkerboard pattern, but more random (if that makes sense). Once the dos prompt goes away, the screen gets a green linear pattern across the black screen and under that you can see the "Opening Windows" progress bar working as if the O.S. is firing up. Once the progress bar is full, the screen goes black and another random black and white pattern covers the screen and you can see the flat cursor at the upper left of the screen flash for a second or two...... and then it goes away and the computer locks up. The screen stays blank, no mouse cursor, and the orange flickering light that indicates that the harddrive is working goes dark.
Each time you power up the computer it goes to a "Start Up Repair" windows program that recommends it be run to try to fix the problem. It runs for anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes and each time the end result is that Windows can't fix the problem. When you click "finish" it then tries to re-boot and does all the same things listed in the paragraph above until the screen goes black and the computer locks.
History:
We've added no new hardware or software in more than a year and have our virus software set to update each day. Last month, I got a window popup that was one of the usual "HP Updates" and told it to do the update. It was an update for the monitor and it added a few extra features to the monitor menu (rotation of the screen view, screen settings for games, movies, etc). Ever since doing that update, the screen saver hasn't worked correctly. After about 5 minutes of inactivity, the screen saver would come on and maybe 5 minutes after that, the monitor would go into power save mode and you'd hear an audible sound like "BE-dunk...... be-DUNK" (cap letters being higher pitch). When you moved the mouse, the computer would wake up from sleep mode, but the monitor would show that it wasn't receiving an output signal from the PC. We'd have to do a re-boot of the computer at that point and all would be back to normal. Just never got around to trying to remove that monitor update or looking to see if it was a setting of some sort.
So, with all that said, it certainly seems we have a problem where it's possible the video/graphics card/program is interfering with the O.S. booting up or something of the like.
Priorities:
1) We recently purchased an external hard drive that does an auto save just by plugging it in and clicking it to save...... unfortunately, never got around to doing that before this issue...... We NEED to save our harddrive and it's contents obviously, but not being able to get the O.S. to start up is keeping us from getting a back-up done with that external HD.
2) Hopefully finding a way to get the O.S. to start up allowing us to get that back up done and then maybe be able to deal with the graphics card issue....:dunno:
Thanks in advance for any help/advice you may be able to provide. :thumbup:
O.S. is Windows Vista. (I know, I know, but surprisingly it's worked great for us for the last 2 years or so with NO issues until now.)
Current problem:
2 days ago, I used the computer 3 times during the day, each time simply waking it up from sleep mode with no problems. My wife went to wake it up that evening and she said it locked up with nothing on the screen. She powered it down, did a re-boot and now it won't "start up". She said a window popped up first time she powered it up that mentioned there was a system error regarding the graphics/video card, but she couldn't duplicate that window on subsequent power ups.
When you power it on now, there's all kinds of graphic issues on the monitor. First you see a black screen with the white letter dos-style prompts as normal, but that's overlayed with numerous large white cursor looking squares almost in a checkerboard pattern, but more random (if that makes sense). Once the dos prompt goes away, the screen gets a green linear pattern across the black screen and under that you can see the "Opening Windows" progress bar working as if the O.S. is firing up. Once the progress bar is full, the screen goes black and another random black and white pattern covers the screen and you can see the flat cursor at the upper left of the screen flash for a second or two...... and then it goes away and the computer locks up. The screen stays blank, no mouse cursor, and the orange flickering light that indicates that the harddrive is working goes dark.
Each time you power up the computer it goes to a "Start Up Repair" windows program that recommends it be run to try to fix the problem. It runs for anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes and each time the end result is that Windows can't fix the problem. When you click "finish" it then tries to re-boot and does all the same things listed in the paragraph above until the screen goes black and the computer locks.
History:
We've added no new hardware or software in more than a year and have our virus software set to update each day. Last month, I got a window popup that was one of the usual "HP Updates" and told it to do the update. It was an update for the monitor and it added a few extra features to the monitor menu (rotation of the screen view, screen settings for games, movies, etc). Ever since doing that update, the screen saver hasn't worked correctly. After about 5 minutes of inactivity, the screen saver would come on and maybe 5 minutes after that, the monitor would go into power save mode and you'd hear an audible sound like "BE-dunk...... be-DUNK" (cap letters being higher pitch). When you moved the mouse, the computer would wake up from sleep mode, but the monitor would show that it wasn't receiving an output signal from the PC. We'd have to do a re-boot of the computer at that point and all would be back to normal. Just never got around to trying to remove that monitor update or looking to see if it was a setting of some sort.
So, with all that said, it certainly seems we have a problem where it's possible the video/graphics card/program is interfering with the O.S. booting up or something of the like.
Priorities:
1) We recently purchased an external hard drive that does an auto save just by plugging it in and clicking it to save...... unfortunately, never got around to doing that before this issue...... We NEED to save our harddrive and it's contents obviously, but not being able to get the O.S. to start up is keeping us from getting a back-up done with that external HD.
2) Hopefully finding a way to get the O.S. to start up allowing us to get that back up done and then maybe be able to deal with the graphics card issue....:dunno:
Thanks in advance for any help/advice you may be able to provide. :thumbup:
