Boris wrote:
Paul wrote in news
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?
On an LCD monitor, the OSD is supposed to display
"Out of Range" when the resolution or refresh is wrong.
A typical "problem" is the Refresh getting set to 150Hz
by a corruption of some kind. The normal LCD refresh is
60Hz.

*******

Safe Mode gets you in (F8),
but I don't know what to do when you get there :-(

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...safe-mode.html

The thing is, there are a couple different places
in the Registry where display resolutions are held,
and I don't have a good technical reference web page
to offer you on the topic.

Even if you uninstall a video driver, the resolution
info is not removed or corrected. So trying a video
driver won't help. But it's the only obvious
option to try.

Paul


On this particular Dell model:
F2 is Safe Mode, etc
F12 is Setup

. I was able to get into Safe Mode, and the desktop came up, I right
clicked on an empty spot on the desktop and left clicked Resolution, and
the Resolution applet came up. I was able to set to 1280 x 1024,
default refresh. I was able to roam all over, and the desk worked fine.
But, when I restarted, it went dark at the desktop. Back to Safe Mode,
I was able to see the proper resolution was still active.

Think I'm ready to System Restore to July 2015.

I'm surprised the OS hasn't erased that restore point.

There is supposed to be some time limit on them.

Since the machine has been sitting in storage, there
is probably no harm done by using the last restore
point it made before sitting on the shelf.

And using System Restore, is a good way of getting
a non-corrupted copy of the Registry. That's one of
the benefits of System Restore points.

Now, one problem is, if you do it from Safe Mode,
you cannot undo it again. If you want a "safety solution",
use your Macrium Reflect CD and back up the drive
to an external drive. If you don't like what the
System Restore did to the machine from Safe Mode,
you may need to reload from the backup. Not that
things can get any worse than they are right now...

Personally, I'd rather fix the Registry, except
I wasn't able to find any decent documentation
on the registry locations.

Paul