Black Screen In The Windows 10 World – Second Time Around
For those of you who remember my piece about the black screen after the last major W10 update (it warns you what it is going to do so you can choose when to update), what I described then didn’t work this time. After signing in, you get a black screen and only a Personal Settings window that doesn’t work. Ctrl, Alt, Del will give you a computer settings screen and Task Manager but a soft-restart won’t do anything to sort this out.
Previously I said a hard reboot would resolve it. This time, it didn’t. Well, it might still work but again I ended up reading Microsoft’s instructions and even more to wade through.
Here’s the link:-
www.windowscentral.com/how-fix-black-screen-problems-windows-10
Unless you have a back-up computer, it’s a bit difficult to see it and even when I did that on mine, the page kept crashing suggesting that a lot of people were looking at it early morning. Things have quietened there now but as this update isn’t done all at once, you might well be in the next wave or pushing it ahead in the W10 Settings Update.
So, let’s give an abridged version.
- Pull the power cable out of your computer. With a laptop, if you can access it, pull the battery. Shame recent models don’t allow that, but the power cable there should be enough. Wait a minute or two before replugging.
- Boot up and sign in, wait patiently if it takes a few minutes to get that far.
- You’ll still get the black screen but then wait. In less than 10 minutes, the screen will restore itself. [This happened this morning on boot-up but I had left my laptop turned off over night so probably did a version of this.]
- The MS site says the video-card drivers not being updated might be the problem. The Radeon on my laptop certainly wasn’t, but they were on the back-up computer so not convinced by that but getting them updated isn’t a bad idea. What is worrying is this has happened again. You would think the Microsoft tech staff would be coming to grips with this problem now, even if it’s only putting instructions on the screen as to how to get out of this problem. It isn’t though window screens can’t come on, just the main screen isn’t functioning. That would at least give a user-friendly solution.
What is worrying is this has happened again. You would think the Microsoft tech staff would be coming to grips with this problem now, even if it’s only putting instructions on the screen as to how to get out of this problem. It isn’t though window screens can’t come on, just the main screen isn’t functioning. That would at least give a user-friendly solution.
At least the info above can be copied and downloaded.
Don’t get caught out. Throwing your computer through a real window isn’t an option.
Geoff Willmetts
15 February 2018