Windows doesn't boot after installing GPU drivers

thomad

Honorable
Feb 26, 2012
5
0
10,510
So I have had this laptop since 2011 without any problems whatsoever.

Back in july this year we had a lan-party, so I did some thourough cleaning - dusting the internals, reinstalling everything, etcetera. Lan-party was great and had zero issues.
Yesterday (a month later, still no issues) I opened some image with skype, as I do countless times a day, and my screen begon to behave erratically. Artifacts, all to black, all to white, cursor artifacts. After a manual reboot everything returned to normal. Then, a couple minutes after booting, the screen turned to black and I did a manual reboot again.

The windows is laoding splash cam up, but upon completion, the screen went black and all status leds were dead.

I launched up Safe Mode, did a restore, but this didn't work.

Reinstalled windows and all was great, up untill I updated my drivers. I have been able to narrow it down to my graphics driver.

I was thinking it had something to do with resolution, since it's terrible before any drivers, but booting with low-res option in windows didn't help either.

After some research I've come up blank since a lot of topics cover DOA GPU's, a desktop upgrade, or plugging in too many cables. None of this is the case since it's a laptop that has been running flawlessly for the last three years.

The laptop at the time was top-tier so all hardware is stil relevant and I don't believe it's an age problem.

Any thoughts?
 

millwright

Distinguished
Before you install drivers, you are running on Basic VGA drivers.
They are very low resolution, and are just for initial installation.

It is over heating, windows is corrupt, or it is a hardware problem.

If it was me, I'd run a Linux live disk, to see if it is hardware or software, it is a lot quicker than a clean install.

The clean install you already did leads me to think, it is not software or drivers.
 

thomad

Honorable
Feb 26, 2012
5
0
10,510

I'll try to find some older version, see if it helps.

I don't think the overheating would be an issue, since windows won't boot at all past the splash screen. All led's go dead as well. Where the "disk active" led is, well, active while booting, after the splash it goes to black.
 

thomad

Honorable
Feb 26, 2012
5
0
10,510

Second answer, second one to suggest overheating problems.. I really doubt this would be the issue, but eh, you never know.

I'll hunt one down right now with some fancy tools.
 

millwright

Distinguished
Any Linux distro install disk, can run in live disc mode.

I agree it doesn't sound like overheating, just throwing out all the possible causes.
If the heat sink came loose, it could overheat immediately.

In my younger more stupid days I had my finger on a CPU when it started.
Got a second degree burn instantly, and destroyed the CPU.