Windows XP not starting up correctly.

Hi all,

A friend of mine is running a desktop computer with Windows XP Home.

Strangely enough, they had to change users for something thing today, and as soon as they entered the password for the other account the monitor swapped into power saving mode.

Since then, the computer seems to start up fine, but when it gets to the point that it would display the welcome screen the monitor jumps into power saving and there is nothing you can do to bring it out. Any ideas?

I'm hesitant to think it is the monitor, because it fine while we go into recovery console, etc. I'm running a chkdsk /r for now due to a lack of a better idea of what to do and you never know what that might help anyway. Suggestions?

I was planning to upgrade my friend to 2gb of RAM and replace his old RAM. Do you have any idea if that would help? Would RAM even cause something like this?

Thanks again.
Jer

 

Can you go into safe mode and change the power settings? Set the monitor to never turning off.

http://www.aces.edu/ctu/techref/networking/HowToChangeXPPowerSettings.pdf

 

If it's an older CRT monitor, then it's probably not the monitor, but if it's LED or LCD then it might be. I'd check the monitor's setup settings in the monitor itself because something may have gotten scrambled. And substituting another monitor, too, would tell you if it's the monitor or not.

If you are sure that it's not the monitor telling itself to power down, then it must be in the Power Settings in Control Panel. tgell suggested how to change that. Be advised, though, that Power Settings are user specific and take precedence over machine settings. If making changes in Safe Mode doesn't work, I'm not sure how you would get back to the problem user account to reset the Power Settings in that account in Normal Mode if the power setting effect is instantaneous when changing users. Any power settings for monitor, hard drive and system have a minimum delay of at least one minute (unless they are set to 'Never' of course). That's why I think it could be a setting or glitch in the monitor itself.