Video card drivers cause black screen on login

DasUberEdward

I'm running windows 7 64 bit and Vista 64 bit. For some reason whenever I install the video card drivers for my nvidia Geforce 8500GT and restart the screen just stays black. I can hear the windows start up chime and if I press a few buttons I can get a sound or two so I know everything is loaded.

but i've got a black screen.

Safe mode works just fine. Then if I uninstall the drivers and restart the PC runs normally with the default VGA driver.

I've tried the last known good configuration but no luck. I have no idea why this started happening I just turned on the PC one day and it was problem city.

oh and i've tried the newest version of the driver as well as the oldest available on the nvidia site.

DasUberEdward

Okay I changed a setting in BIOS from PEG to PCI and it seems like I may have fixed the problem.

DasUberEdward

Scratch that. Okay so it's still on PCI express. It survived one restart before heading back into familiar territory of the black screen. Any ideas at all?

Thomamelas

Under the following registry key, what is it's type and data:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell

DasUberEdward

There is nothing there. winlogon has Autologonchecl and GPExtensions

Thomamelas

You don't have a key that looks like:

Shell Reg_sz explorer.exe

DasUberEdward

Thomamelas wrote: »

You don't have a key that looks like:

Shell Reg_sz explorer.exe

Oh whoops I was looking for a folder.

It looks exactly as you say it should.

(Edit: have to be off. But thanks for anything you come up with i'll try out everything you throw my way tomorrow)

DasUberEdward

Okay still dealing with this and lost. If I start up in low resolution 640x480 I have no problem but if I increase the resolution to anything beyond 1024x1028 it's back to the black screen. Windows doesn't even revert to the previous resolution after 15 seconds like it normally would.

matt has a problem

640x480 and 800x600 are usually no-drivers-necessary resolutions. Once you pass that, for the most part, you're riding on your video card's drivers. Where did you get the drivers from?

Thomamelas

DasUberEdward wrote: »

Okay still dealing with this and lost. If I start up in low resolution 640x480 I have no problem but if I increase the resolution to anything beyond 1024x1028 it's back to the black screen. Windows doesn't even revert to the previous resolution after 15 seconds like it normally would.

Check for more current drivers?

DasUberEdward

Thomamelas wrote: »

DasUberEdward wrote: »

Okay still dealing with this and lost. If I start up in low resolution 640x480 I have no problem but if I increase the resolution to anything beyond 1024x1028 it's back to the black screen. Windows doesn't even revert to the previous resolution after 15 seconds like it normally would.

Check for more current drivers?

I've tried everything from the oldest drivers I could find in the nvidia archive to their newest beta drivers. Still the same problem no matter what version I install.

Thomamelas

Dumb question but is the refresh rate set correctly?

DasUberEdward

It's set at 60hertz. I've never touched that so i'm not sure what would be proper?