Vista won't wake up at all!!

Firstly it's my (old) Dad's computer; he's located 3 hrs away and I'm becoming his kinda 'telephone support' which is frustrating/stressful. :sa:

I have read lots and lots and lots of posts on various forums about this issue but none of them are exactly the same as his, and the suggested solutions won't/can't work neither.

Symptoms - the tower lights up, the monitor changes from a floating 'No signal' to just black/blank. My understanding is that the monitor has therefore recognised that there is an 'input' connected?

Other recommended 'fixes' - deactivate the sleep and hibernation functions, fine but he can't even boot it up to do this!

Actions taken so far - another tower has been used to test that the monitor is working fine - it is. The BIOS/motherboard battery has been removed overnight, and then replaced, to reset the BIOS.


So, because he can't actually get to work with the tower i.e. change or test settings, where can he go from here? I've read about issues with Nvidia drivers etc but again, he can't update them if he can't even get the tower going.

Is replacing the graphics card (something he could probably do with me on the end of the phone for 3 hours!! ) going to fix this? I appreciate that the card itself may not be 'knackered' and it's likely to be a driver issue, but would replacing it at least get him some 'on screen action' to work with?

It's really quite frustrating trying to help him from this far away but I also know that he really misses his 'window to the outside world' when it's not working.

Just to add, he has Vista Home 32bit edition, on a HP tower.

Sorry, that's all I know about his system specs.

Any further ideas/solutions/suggestions (even pure guesses!!) will be gratefully received. TIA.

The KSOD (Black Screen of Death) is one of the most difficult problems to solve - and trying it over the phone will probably be very difficult.

At work we try a couple of things and give up rather quickly:
- we try another video card
- we try updating drivers (if we can get into Safe Mode)
- we try SFC.EXE /SCANNOw
- we try System Restore

If all that fails, then we backup the data, perform a hardware diagnostic (just in case), then we wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows.

But this requires that you get some sort of video display in order to boot from the restore media. Trying another video card is nearly your only recourse at this point - as you've gotta get a display in order to start working.

I'd suggest a road trip this weekend - and spend the time there with the difficult stuff that you can't talk him through. Bring a selection of video cards so you can get started right away.