Christina Sng dot com » XP

Black Screen on Monitor Fix

Christina — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:30:54 +0000

This happened to me twice. Once on my Lenovo and today again on hubby’s desktop. After booting and running the Windows start up screen, the monitor blanks out. Something about analog or digital. I just wanted to shake the monitor into waking up again.

Anyway, with the laptop it was easy since it works with an inbuilt screen already. Just fiddle with the display settings and install an updated driver and that usually works. But what if you can’t see a damn thing on the screen with the desktop?

On XP, while booting up, press F8 and you’ll be faced with a whole bunch of choices on how you want to boot up. Choose VGA mode and lo and behold, that errant screen will display your desktop, albeit in 640×480.

Windows will most likely let you know this isn’t the ideal display setting but even if it doesn’t, just right-click your desktop and head to Properties -> Settings. Check out your resolution and see if you can change it to your desired one. If it doesn’t work, go disable and re-enable your monitor driver. That did the trick for me.

I’m gonna claim a nice reward tomorrow now that hubby can play Warcraft III again.

(Credit: Vista Forums)

Vista Adventures: Common XP Problems

Christina — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:46:36 +0000

Yes, I’ve tons of complaints about Vista but XP has driven me up the wall before. It is always the case that when you have something new to complain about, the old gets forgotten. It is convenient I have forgotten the number of reformats I had had to do and the many restarts. This article reminded me to be grateful of some of the new shinys that Vista has brought.

Behold: Windows XP common problems!

Admittedly it is arguably the most stable OS to date, here are some of the classics:

1. Many frozen programs. Why oh why did you hang on me again, WoW?

2. Yet another corrupted file. Thanks to the new spanking program you just installed, you’ll have to clean your reg again. Careful not to delete the wrong ones or your OS won’t run.

These two are hefty enough already. The article does offer solutions. Check it out.

My conclusion: maybe Vista isn’t so bad after all. If they could only fix the damned slow speed, locust-like System Restore, and eyeball-gougingly annoying user permission screen for almost every program it runs.

Blue Screen of Death nv4.disp Infinite Loop Bug

Christina — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:29:33 +0000

This transpired over a few weeks. Yes. I got lazy to find a fix. Here’s the sequence of events as they unfolded.

First, the computer (running on XP) hung, probably got kicked accidentally too often due to inopportune placement next to my feet. Mouse pointer frozen. I hesitated to restart but I did.

Then the screen went blank. I was highly disturbed.

When the blue screen of death (BSOD) flashed, I panicked. Some garbled message about infinite loop appeared and physical dumping began. I quickly scribbled down the culprit, nv4.disp, and restarted again.

Now the screen remained blank. Panic ensued. I searched Google on my trusty phone for an answer.

Search: blue+screen+of+death+nv4.disp+loop

Results: Christopher Jason’s brilliant fix

Solution: Basically I needed to download the latest Nvidia driver, uninstall the existing Nvidia driver, install the new one, reboot, and it worked again. Chris Jason rocks!

Now I can sleep.