Screen doesn't always come on

[woogie]

At times, when the computer has been off and I turn it back on, windows will not appear on the screen. The computer always powers up, sometimes I'll see the DOS screen and sometimes I won't, but when windows should come up, nothing happens. The screen just goes blank. If I try to switch off the computer I am unable to. I have to use the switch on the surge protector. When I turn it back on again, I am instructed to either use the safe mode or to boot normally. When I choose "normally" windows comes back and all is well.

I'm not sure if this is a video problem, a windows problem or I don't know what. There has been a sound issue where every sound works except the windows startup, so I can't even tell if windows is actually booting up until I see it on the screen.

I have tightened the video connection and reslotted the Video card (Nvidea Ti200). I'm running XP. Any ideas?

[Rick]

When you turn off the computer are you also turning off the monitor?
Or just letting it go into suspend / power saver mode?

Check the feature menu on your monitor for suspend and wake up (if it has the feature) Built in .

If you are turning off the monitor when shutting down your system.
Power up the monitor Before turning on the computer.
It should or may display a no signal message.
Then boot/ power up the system..

[Sylvander]

Hello Woogie

I recall, from the dim recesses of my memory, the fact that Windows has a special feature built into it;

When Windows is booting [that's in the later stages of the boot process] and it is unable to load a device driver or initialise a device or complete the initialisation, the boot process will halt [which is, I think, what is happening to you]
Microsoft advises that you should then switch off [at the power switch] and switch back on. [which is what you did]
Windows will then automatically by-pass the command line [or procedure] which failed and continue with the remainder of the boot process.
This can and should be done repeatedly, if necessary.
Since you only required to do this once it indicates that only one procedure is failing [probably the loading of your sound card driver].

What you need to do is to:

CREATE A "BOOTLOG.TXT" FILE
and then study it's contents, as follows:

1. Boot the PC and blip F8 repeatedly to go to the "Startup Menu".
2. At the Startup Menu select option "2.Logged(\Bootlog.txt)" and press enter.
3. If it boots ok, fine, if not switch off and back on after 15 seconds delay. when you finally get all the way into Windows, use the find facility to find "Bootlog.txt". Open it and use the find facility within the file [ctrl+F] to seek "Fail". This will show you procedures which have failed. Not all are a problem.

My file has 3 "Fail"'s;
"LoadFailed = NDIS2SUP.VXD"
"DeviceInitFailed = MTTR"
"InitComleteFailed = SDVXD"
and my PC appears to work ok.

You may find something more significant that you may recognise.
This, hopefully, will tell you where your problem lies.

Perhaps a device driver cannot be loaded into memory because there are no resources available to be allocated to it, or it is demanding resouces which are already allocated. Perhaps you have disable PNP or it is not totally free to allocate resources since some have been manually selected?

Have you checked resource usage and device configuration in Device Manager?

[Sylvander]

My apologies to everyone

Those dim recesses were pretty dim.

That "special feature" that Windows has built into it only operates at the "Hardware Detection Phase" during the installation of the Windows operating system and you use "Smart Recovery" to bypass the step.

I think that perhaps during step 3 it would be necessary to reboot into safe mode to examine the "bootlog.txt" file.