the black screen
 

alrighty,

so I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop with Vista operating system. I tried starting it up today as usual and instead of taking me to the Vista welcome screen where I input the password, it stops on a black screen where the only thing visible is the mouse arrow (which is still functional).

it's been pesky trying to restart it, as the black screen doesn't really allow for anything to work obviously, also turning it off via power button is weird too. I have to pretty much hold it down for a minute before it realizes what I'm trying to do.

anywho, I went in through safemode and uninstalled the graphics card, then restarted, then vista auto installed the drivers upon entering safemode again, but that didn't fix anything on the next restart. I've just been transferring files via USB key all day just incase it decides to fry the HD.

any ideas on what to try next?

I'd appreciate any and all help... it's kind of a busy time of the semester. need this to work. ;_;

Did you install anything recently that might have locked it up at start up? It sounds to me like a startup program is just hanging up and not proceeding.

Try hooking it up to a monitor. Does the black screen still happen?

I ended up going in and doing a system restore. my most recent point was just friday (saturday being the last time it worked properly before turning it off), so I figured nothing too crazy would happen. everything appears to be working now... but if the issue was a windows update, won't the same thing happen again tomorrow?

It's shaping up to not be an uncommon problem caused by a glitchy windows update.

If you manually disable windows update, you'll be able to prevent this from re-occurring. For security reasons, you should reactivate it once Microsoft resolves the issue.

Yeah, just stumbled upon this on Engadget.

Windows 7 Black Screen of Death? (It's not as bad as it sounds.) -- Engadget

Found this one on CNN:

Microsoft investigating 'screen of death' - CNN.com

Sounds like someone screwed up at Microsoft. Not a good showing for unveiling a new OS for the holidays if you ask me. I still like 7 though.