Weird problem, screen blanking

Hi, glad I surfed into this forum!

Little history on the pc, picked it up used (HP/Compaq d530 Ultra-slim Desktop) all stock components with a fresh XP Pro OS loaded on there. Upgraded to a Maxtor 200GB IDE and loaded my XP Pro Essentials disk. Tried to get on the web and found out there were no drivers what-so-ever for the network card. So I start to load some programs, got Office 07' on there and tried to load the Samsung disk for my Blackjack PDA cell, during that install the screen went black and I could do nothing. Green power light stayed on but couldn't do anything. Restarted and right at the same point with the cd it did it again so I got ****** and left it along for a few days. Today I went and bought a new internal network card and installed it. Poked around on the CD it came with after I installed the drivers to look at the info associated with it and black screen again. Did this twice. So I restarted, plugged in the ethernet line and voila.. internet. Went to Windows update to get it up to date, it scanned the computer and was ready to download. I clicked install and black screen! Tried 3 times and same deal. Put the network card cd in for grins and as it was trying to just load it, black screen.

I am at a loss. I can sit there and poke around the computer itself for any extended amount of time looking in files and what not. But as soon as I want it to do something like read a cd or load the updates I get the problem. Anyone have any clues? I'm about to go office space on it.

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS.

I am not quite certain whether you are using an original Hewlett Packard installation disk. If you installed using a retail version of Windows, I doubt you will have the correct chipset drivers installed. They will be proprietary drivers and will only be available on the original HP install CD or if you purchase an install CD for that version of Windows from HP.

Let me know if I have misread your information.

Matt
[If drivers seem OK, you may need to open the case, reseat all the connections and remove any dust buildup.]

 

Thanks for the reply Matt. I do not have a copy of the HP install cd. Computer came as is used but I was told it had no problems, obviously I was lied to since I had the network card problem origionally before I swapped Drives. I've poked around on HP's site looking at drivers but I really don't know what I'm looking at since I'm not as savy with a computer as I'd like to be.

If dust could be a culprit then I can remedy that. It seems abit dusty in there but I really don't think that is the problem since I can run the system for as long as I want poking around but as soon as I need it to do some work it blacks out, lazy pc. But what do I know, I'm a n00b!

 

You should try asking the people that you bought it from if you can have the installation and driver disks for it. If they don't have the same model of computer, the disks are probably useless to them.

You can look in Device Manager (Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager). See if driver problems are listed. The trouble will be that you will only be able to get the correct drivers from the original installation CDs. The main chipset drivers are not available for download from HP (as I said, they are proprietary).

I think you will only have two options to make it work correctly. Get the disks from the people you bought it from or purchase the disks from HP.

Matt

 

Good Pete, they look like they are all there. News for me if they are.

Matt