E510 Goes Black When Desktop Comes Up

Ben Myers wrote in
:

On Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 11:21:49 PM UTC-5, pjp wrote:
In article , lid
says...

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...our-forgotten-
wind
ows- 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.

*******

I thought the idea was to enter safe mode and select the lowest res
allowed. Then boot back into normal mode which should also load that
low res and then up it to what you want, e.g. set it to 800x600 in
safe mode and assuming you then get a screen under normal mode try
upping res until it stops working. If it's not what you expect at
that point you can diagnose further. I've had to do that a few times
years ago mucking with video cards and monitors before hardware
worked itself out.

You might also try deleting the video driver under Device manager in
safe mode and see what happens when it redetects video card when
booted normally.

Yep, those are good ideas.
Yes, those are very good ideas. However, there comes a time when trying
to fix things is no longer fun, and you just want to reinstall. A
reinstall was fine with me, bacause there was nothing I needed to backup
or save. This was my son's pc that he didn't use anymore. Besides, I
thought I'd just reinstall the Dell OEM Windows XP Media Center Edition
2005 that came with the machine. I had the entire set of disks. So,
that's what I did. As a standalone (not connected to home network or
internet, it works fine. But, I have another problem that for the life
of me, I can't figure out. I'm starting another thread for this
problem. Briefly, it's that I can't get the ethernet controller
installed, and therefore, can't connect to the internet. (I don't care
about connecting to my own home ethernet/wireless network.)

Please see my new post. It will be only in the alt.sys.pc-clone.dell
newsgroup.

Thanks much.