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Microsoft Investigates Windows 7 "Black Screen of Death"
duguk writes "Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the 'black screen of death,' which affects Windows 7 — and reports suggest it affects Vista and XP, too. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, released on Tuesday 25 November, caused the problem. The error means that users of Windows 7 and earlier operating systems see a totally black screen after logging on to the system." Update: 12/01 22:35 GMT by KD : Microsoft now says that its November Windows updates are not causing the BlackSOD: "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."
Had this the other day (Win7 Ultmate, Q6600 8GB RAM) it sat for a couple of minutes (there was some disk activity). Afterwards everything was fine; I chalked it up to an update and looks as though I was right.
The issue is not limited to Win7 but effects most versions of windows. A ACL bug causes the black screen http://www.prevx.com/blog/140/Black-Screen-woes-could-affect-millions-on-Windows--Vista-and-XP.html
11/24 my windows machine is working perfectly,. Been up for over a month and fully activated (I bought the $30 Win 7 prof. EDU discount). Turn off my computer the same night (vacation).
11/28 come back from vacation turn my computer on and it updates itself with the 11/25 patches. As soon as they are installed all of a sudden my copy is no longer genuine and I get all the warnings.
Spend 2 hours with Microsoft last night. product key is valid. They tell me that windows updater is corrupted and I need to reinstall the entire OS. I was told it is an "issue" when doing a custom upgrade from Vista.
Now this article is out I am wondering if their patches tried to tighten some DRM and broke a lot more then being reported.
It's something video related, I've seen this bug in the two machines (Win7, can't speak for Vista) I own and for some reason the monitor get "reset" to 59 Hz instead of 60 Hz and I get the black screen. The funny thing is that is the LCD lamp is not turned on but the screen does, so if you put some light in front of the screen you'll still be able to see something in the screen. This one and a USB bug that prevents the mouse getting detected was sufficient to go back to XP. I can't believe how these bugs pass QC. And sorry for my possibly bad english. Carlos
I removed an expired copy of Kaspersky AV from a Vista laptop yesterday, did a wndows-update and installed free AVG. On rebooting it black-screened.
in that instance another forced reboot brought the system back as normal - I have no explanation
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
first was while playing a game online, and I though it was the game that crashed. Black screen, nothing worked, but the background music from the game kept playing. I waited longer than 5 minutes to see if the game would exit. When it did not I got suspicios since protected memory in 7 should not have allowed the gamr to crash the kernel. NOTHIGN was in the error logs related to it (other than the obligitory "you did not shut down properly" errors after I hit the reset button on the tower.
Next day, I had just turned it on about 20 minutes earlier, and the only thing running was Opera. Same deal, complete lock up.
7 has been running great on this machine since the day it hit my MAPS dowload queue and I installed it. Not one crash prior except an issue installing HP's printer system first time around (second try, it worked flawlessly).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Interesting that Shrike82 is never accurate, at least according to wikipedia: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T "Colors By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model Ts. However, it was a monolithic bloc; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".[17] Model Ts in different colors were produced from 1908 to 1914, and then again from 1926 to 1927."
And the worms ate into his brain.
Nvidia's entire 19x series of drivers have consistently been a problem with fallout 3, ranging from stuttering to BSOD's. I recommend installing the WHQL Release 186. I never had bluescreens, but it stuttered like mad til I reverted to 186. Got a few graphical glitches in complex geometry (clipping mostly) but they were minor and the smoothness was worth it. I'll give this to nvidia, at least they do make the earlier drivers easily available.
Now if someone could tell me which drivers will play nice with both Dragon Age and Anno 1404... Don't tell me, ATI, right?
Cue the characteristic Slashdot flavor of older-than-you elitism! Oh wait, I'm too late...
But seriously, completely irrelevant age differences aside: There's a reason why Microsoft catches flak for security holes, and also a very good reason for why they so adamantly encourage people to update their OS as often as possible. Microsoft (and certainly your full comprehension of the vulnerability of the OS) are far from infallible; their software is extremely complicated and will always present new bugs and design flaws, and this is why they take so many measures to patch their security holes. This is true of any major software developer.
So unless your machine is not exposed to any sort of network, or unless you're running an old version of Windows that has (since 2003) had it support discontinued by Microsoft, then I argue that you don't know what you're doing.
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black dont burn on CRT. On CRT black pixel are "off".
On the contrairy, black pixel is 100% "on" on LCD.
LCD block light from the backlight when they do black.
CRT dont lit up when they do black.
Micro-soft changed to black only for marketing reason.
And had it blue before for the exact same reason.