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Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

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East Freeetown, Massachusetts
I have a T420 Lenovo notebook

Win7 Pro 64 bit

I turned it on today and it went into Windows automatic updates.

After a while the screen went blank (black)

I have a cursor and it moves around

I can CRT, ALT, DELETE - and then reboot.

I can get into safe mode

I did a restore but the only available point was at the windows update time.

I did the restore and have the same result.

Any guesses?
 
Bad video card, or bad screen? Had a similar experience two years ago. It was under warranty from Dell and took the tech three trips to my house (2 new video cards and finally a new screen) to fix.
 
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If it were me {and I'm no techie}, I would try uninstalling the display adapter thru device manager, then reboot to let your machine reinstall it..
Could also try uninstalling the update{s} and rebooting...could of received a bad file, not that something like that would happen with MS :eek::D
Just a quick thought until the pros here show up :thumb:
 
I'd say follow what Ken suggested. Boot to safe mode and remove the display adapter. Since it sounds like you see something in safe mode, points to driver, not the display hardware.
 
I am not a Windows person (haven't been in a long time), so consider the source for this advice.....

The fact you can see the cursor and nothing else, makes me wonder if:
The update wasn't finished, and doing some kind of screen suspend/not full blown screensaver (if so, try right clicking to see if the screen comes back).
The update goofed up the drivers for the video and they will need to be updated (hard to do if you can't see the screen).

Did you boot into safe mode as text or gui?
 
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Randal Stevenson said:
I am not a Windows person (haven't been in a long time), so consider the source for this advice.....

The fact you can see the cursor and nothing else, makes me wonder if:
The update wasn't finished, and doing some kind of screen suspend/not full blown screensaver (if so, try right clicking to see if the screen comes back).
The update goofed up the drivers for the video and they will need to be updated (hard to do if you can't see the screen).

Did you boot into safe mode as text or gui?
Click to expand...

I am just knowledgable enough with computers to get by. I use them at work every day and I am considered a power user by the IT department. BUT - I don't really consider myself to be a computer knowledgable person.

I hit the F8 key on bootup to get to safe mode and operated the restore from there. I don't know if that is GUI of text. I didn't click on an ICON - I make a menu selection.
 
Had the same thing happen the other day at work. I logged onto my PC and it came up exactly like you said, black screen with a cursor. Also, I have two monitors and only one was working. I did a cold reboot (held the power button down to power off the computer then restarted everything). When the PC powered back up I got a screen saying windows had not shut down properly, did I want to restart normally or in safe mode. I chose normal start up and when I logged back in everything was fine.
 
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