Welcome to A Tech's Life. The purpose of this blog is to provide insight to some of the simple and more complicated chores that I encounter during my day as a Computer Technician.

My website is InfoTechNow

Monday, August 24, 2009

Windows Vista Black Screen with Mouse Pointer

Today I travelled to a costumer's house to find Vista loading to a black screen with only the mouse pointer. It was rather dumbfounding as I could ctrl-alt-esc to get the task manager, but could do nothing from there. There was obviously a service that was hanging.

I booted into safe mode and ran msconfig. (Hit windows button and r at the same time and type msconfig in the text area.) From there I navigated to the services tab and selected disable all, and then enabled all of the services currently working in safe mode. I hit accept and reset.

Though reading, in some cases you may not be able to enter safe mode, but whilst at the (blac)KSOD you can hit the shift key 5 times the sticky keys window. From there click the Go to the Ease of Access .... Link and type msconfig in the address bar. You may want to try that before even going into safe mode as it will save you a step.

Upon reboot like magic it worked. Now I had the unevious task of discovering which of the 100 services I had disabled to see which one it was. I chose to enable 15 at a time until I found the cuplrit. Having Application Experince and Apple Phone disabled in the end seem to solve the problem. I am sure in different situations it will be different services. As long as they are not essential services then it seems like an easy work around for this lovely Vista bug.

--KC

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please feel free to comment if you see an error, have a alternate solution or if it help you out!