Screen blank on Dell 630 on restart

Topic

New Reply

Hi. Not certain whether this is the correct forum to post, but feel this is a software problem. We have a dell Latitude D630 we bought off lease. Has Windows 7 Pro SP1 installed. One day about a month ago, while performing a restart, the screen was black. I thought it may have been something to do with a possible update and was taking a long time, but after 30 minutes, it failed to display. I restarted the laptop with the power switch, but the same symptoms persisted. I thought that it could be either a hardware or software problem, so hooked the laptop to a monitor. No issues there, everything displayed well. I restarted in safe mode, then restarted again, disconnected the monitor,and the laptop screen failed to display. I thought it may have been something with the LCD display or some connection. After several attempts, and cycling through the LCD/CRT function key, it finally came up. I have tried the battery pull, hold the power switch down for 60 sec then restart but found the same problem Over the past few weeks, this problem happens every time we restart the laptop, however is not present when the machine goes into power saver or sleep mode. I have checked start up programs and there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary there, and have done a full virus scan (clear). The other thing is that when it does restart, the date resets to June 21, 2008.
I am assuming something is amiss in Windows. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the graphics chip, as the monitor works fine, nor with the screen, as it pops up after being in sleep mode. Being an off lease, I didn’t get any recovery disks and it doesn’t have a recovery partition. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Reply | Quote

Replies

Welcome to the lounge.

When you say that the time resets to 2008, it makes me think that your CMOS battery is dead.

Reply | Quote

In your post you seem to suggest the problem started with some updates … Windows Updates, perhaps? Do you have it set to install all updates or only critical ones?

I’ve seen this sort of behavior from non-Dell graphics driver updates, so that would be my first suspect. Perhaps Windows surreptitiously updated your graphics driver. As a general rule, I recommend never installing hardware updates offered by Windows Update, particularly if that update will replace a driver that Dell originally provided (such as video, audio, modem, nic, or touchpad).

Since you can successfully boot with an external monitor, you might try booting that way and seeing if you can roll back the graphics driver in Device Manager.

If that doesn’t help, I’d try using System Restore to roll back to a date just before the problem first started.

And BTW, you really should have been using a decent imaging utility for OS backups–especially considering you don’t have a Recovery partition or a Dell Reinstallation DVD.

Reply | Quote

You can download a Win 7 SP1 ISO from http://www.w7forums.com/threads/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads.12325/ and use http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool to create a bootable USB/DVD and Belarc Advisor will give you the product key as this machine didn’t come shipped with Win 7, so I’m not sure which drivers are being used http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/04/Product/latitude-d630 although there appear to be some on http://driverscollection.com/?H=Latitude%20D630&By=Dell

May be a good idea to have a good look through Device Manager/View/Show hidden devices and/or msinfo32 although you would normally back up the drivers folders from Windows/System32 if you ever needed to reinstall.

It could be related to a bad CMOS battery given the age of the machine, but you could also check to see if Dell Diagnostics finds anything https://www.dell.com/support/Diagnostics/us/en/19/

Reply | Quote

I’m with Riffraff — the clock makes me think it’s the CMOS battery.

That’s an easy thing to replace. Do that before spending a lot of time fixing Windows.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote

Hi. Thanks for all your help. DG1261 did provide an avenue to explore, and yes, I did roll back the driver (or actually reinstalled the dell driver) that seemed to correct the problem. Interestingly, the backdating stopped as well, but I have a new battery on order anyway. Also, thanks to Sudo15 for the links to the W7 ISO. Created a bootable DVD. Will look into a disc image software as Riffraff mentioned…I know Fred had an article on it. Thanks again. Saved me hours of frustration

Reply | Quote