On Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 4:26:36 PM UTC-5, Boris wrote:
Boris wrote in
09.88:

I have a Dell E510 that has been running Windows 7 Ultimate fine for a
while. I put it on the shelf in October 2015, and brought it back out
last night. I forgot the password, so I used the Dell supplied OS
disk, went into repair, and used the sethc.exe method to reset the
password:

http://www.howtogeek.com/96630/how-t...otten-windows-
password-the-easy-way/

This worked, but now the monitor power light goes from green to orange
(power saving mode), the keyboard lights go out, and the mouse light
goes out. I can hear the power supply fan still going. Thinking it
may have been a problem with the discrete video card, I removed it and
set to use the onboard video. Same problem. The problem also exists
in all Safe Modes.

Funny, though, as long as I don't enter my new password, the thing
stays on. That is, it will sit there forever asking me to enter my
password, but as soon as I do, everything goes out either immediately
after hitting Enter, or a few seconds after the desktop comes up.
I've tried a different monitor, too, but same problem.

Any ideas?

TIA


I noticed thatthere was a (probably) monitor generated message that
flashed very, very quickly just before the monitor went black. I took a
video of it with my cell phone, and watched the particular two frames
that had the message:

"Cannot Display This Video Mode
Optimum Resolution 1200 x 1024 68mHz"

How in the world do I change this if I can't get into the desktop?

Can you start up the E510 in safe mode (F8)? Once in safe mode, change the resolution there. Apparently it was originally used with a different monitor.

I usually remove Windows login passwords with this:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

You can download and run it from a CD (obsolete), floppy (even more onsolete) or a bootable flash stick. Download the latest ISO and use RUFUS or YUMI to set up the flash stick.