This morning, I powered on my computer, and…nothing. Vista refused to start. There was just a plain blue screen (not the BSOD aka Blue Screen of Death) with no icons, no wallpaper, no taskbar…NOTHING. I figured it was a video driver problem, so I uninstalled the present nVidia drivers, downloaded fresh ones from the Net (I could do all this because I booted up using Safe Mode with Networking).
Installed the new drivers in Safe Mode, rebooted, and…same problem. Made me wonder, so I uninstalled the nVidia drivers, rebooted and asked Vista to look for new video drivers. Did this in Device Manager. It did so, and after one more reboot, voila! Vista started up with all the familiar icons, wallpapers, etc.
Man, this OS can be picky about video drivers. So a good thing to try would be to let Vista connect to the web and download the drivers it deems “suitable” for your system. This was what I did with my oldish Creative SB card, and I’ve had no problems with that.
Vista can be picky about drivers no matter how you cut it. I’ve had several peripherals I’ve had to specifically point to the System32 folder to find the “generic” ones in order to get them working. Funny – you plug in something and it says “Ah I see you have a such and such made by such and such….but darn! I can’t find any drivers!” So much for plug’n'play with Vista.
But I’m glad you are back up and running. I’m sure it was NOT a fun experience!!
No, it wasn’t, Doris…it consumed an hour of my precious morning. But I did learn from it though.
[...] taking a big risk. I uninstalled the nVidia graphics drivers that Vista had installed (see my post Startup woes), went to nVidia’s website and downloaded the newest drivers for my GeForce 7200GS graphics [...]
[...] Vista on my computer resembled the Titanic-it crashed and sunk. If you’ve been following my Startup woes posts, you’ll know how I was faring. Toward the weekend, Vista was behaving like a very sick [...]