Dell laptop Win 11 BLACK screen!

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HELP!

My wife is running a Dell laptop with Win 11.  Yesterday, she booted it up to an essentially totally black screen! A browser she didn’t install, called “Wave Browser” then filled her screen. When she exited this app, the screen went totally black again:

No start window or button

No email

No quick launch bar

No settings window or icon.

 

She asked me to help, but I run Win 10 and have no idea of what happened to her system. I cannot even so a restore, sine I have no access to the settings menu.  🙁

Can anyone help?

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Black screen:  Try a couple restarts.  If no joy, boot into safe mode to see if you can get a display.  If so, open Task Manager / Startup and see what apps are running on start up and disable anything that looks suspicious then restart again.  You can re-enable apps if needed from startup.

The Wave Browser is not safe. Uninstall it.  After that download and run adwcleaner from Malware Bytes.

https://nordvpn.com/blog/wave-browser-virus/

https://www.malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner

Run a full scan the built-in Microsoft Defender

 

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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b

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How does one boot into safe mode?

 

 

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Paul T wrote:

You are right, F8 probably doesn’t work on W10/11.
See this post for ways to get to Safe Mode.
https://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/safe-mode-f8-doesnt-work/

cheers, Paul

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Thanks, but that post is for Win 10. My wife is running Win 11, and I know nothing!

 

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Use the “force power off 3 times” option.
Hold the power button down for 10 seconds to force a hard power off.
Power on.
Repeat 3 times to get the recovery screen up.
Choose Advanced Recovery.

cheers, Paul

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WSpfeldmann, TechTango

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The “Hard Reset” technique worked! I was able to reset her computer and bring up the settings app, then find the Wave Browser app and delete it from her Dell Laptop.  I sincerely hope it is now dead and gone!

Thank you SO MUCH for this tip —  we were ready to throw the whole laptop in the garbage after several days of frustration.  I’m a long time Windows’ user – actually began with IBM-PC DOS in 1982. Windows Secrets and Ask Woody  have been invaluable in helping this aging person keep up, at least partly, with our modern world. 🙂

My best wishes to all who responded to my plea for help.

-Peter

 

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TechTango

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Even if all seems well I would advise:

a manual Windows Defender quick scan if that is your antivirus

a Malwarebytes free quick scan

buy an external hard drive and a USB key to use with backup software to make an image backup and rescue drive in case of future problems.

Unless you can find out what went wrong, add some protection by using an adblocker in all browsers.

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From your black screen try a pure keyboard shortcut to reset/restart your graphics driver.

 Windows key + Ctrl + Shift + B.

>> How to: <<

Press and hold the Windows key + Ctrl + Shift keys and while holding them down, tap the B key then release all the keys.

The screen will flicker and go black for a second, and it will be back in less than a second.

 

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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I did that, but the screen just stays completely black!

No quick launch window, no windows icon, nothing. I can open task manager. I’ve looked in startup apps, but nothing seems that suspicious. The only app that shows as being loaded is wave browser. If I close that, I revert to black.  🙁

 

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https://windowsreport.com/windows-11-black-screen-issue/

 

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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