Karlin High
Member
- Reaction score
- 10
- Location
- Missouri, USA
A client brought in a Gateway NV78 notebook with video issues. It's running Windows 7 64-bit, and the screen goes black just when the login screen should appear on startup. It displays the BIOS splash, Windows 7's little swarm of colored dots - then nothing. It plays the startup sounds with a black screen, and if you blindly log in it makes successful sounds for that, too. I tried an external monitor. It behaves exactly the same way as the built-in monitor - it looks good until the login screen, then blacks out.
The client suspected a virus; the computer goes to Facebook a lot, and possibly red-light websites (when young men of the house are unsupervised.) I used Partition Magic Live's Clonezilla to image the drive before beginning work; the screen worked fine for that. Afterwards, Super Anti-Spyware and Kaspersky 10 Rescue Disc (screen OK there) both found a few things to delete, but the video problems remained.
Unless you boot in Safe Mode, that is. The screen is fine there, but it shows the "VGAsave" driver; I never saw that before and have suspicions about it. I downloaded and installed the video and chipset drivers from Gateway, but it made no difference. (I noticed the drivers from Gateway were older than the installed versions.)
So, the screen works just about everywhere but a normal Windows boot. Re-installing video and chipset drivers didn't help. Google doesn't seem to show anything closely related to this problem. Any ideas?
The client suspected a virus; the computer goes to Facebook a lot, and possibly red-light websites (when young men of the house are unsupervised.) I used Partition Magic Live's Clonezilla to image the drive before beginning work; the screen worked fine for that. Afterwards, Super Anti-Spyware and Kaspersky 10 Rescue Disc (screen OK there) both found a few things to delete, but the video problems remained.
Unless you boot in Safe Mode, that is. The screen is fine there, but it shows the "VGAsave" driver; I never saw that before and have suspicions about it. I downloaded and installed the video and chipset drivers from Gateway, but it made no difference. (I noticed the drivers from Gateway were older than the installed versions.)
So, the screen works just about everywhere but a normal Windows boot. Re-installing video and chipset drivers didn't help. Google doesn't seem to show anything closely related to this problem. Any ideas?
