Microsoft Investigates Windows 7 "Black Screen of Death" 351
duguk writes "Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the 'black screen of death,' which affects Windows 7 — and reports suggest it affects Vista and XP, too. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, released on Tuesday 25 November, caused the problem. The error means that users of Windows 7 and earlier operating systems see a totally black screen after logging on to the system." Update: 12/01 22:35 GMT by KD : Microsoft now says that its November Windows updates are not causing the BlackSOD: "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."
Had this myself.. not a showstopper (Score:3, Informative)
Had this the other day (Win7 Ultmate, Q6600 8GB RAM) it sat for a couple of minutes (there was some disk activity). Afterwards everything was fine; I chalked it up to an update and looks as though I was right.
Headline is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is not limited to Win7 but effects most versions of windows. A ACL bug causes the black screen http://www.prevx.com/blog/140/Black-Screen-woes-could-affect-millions-on-Windows--Vista-and-XP.html [prevx.com]
patches may make Win 7 not genuine (Score:5, Informative)
11/28 come back from vacation turn my computer on and it updates itself with the 11/25 patches. As soon as they are installed all of a sudden my copy is no longer genuine and I get all the warnings.
Spend 2 hours with Microsoft last night. product key is valid. They tell me that windows updater is corrupted and I need to reinstall the entire OS. I was told it is an "issue" when doing a custom upgrade from Vista.
Now this article is out I am wondering if their patches tried to tighten some DRM and broke a lot more then being reported.
Happened to me twice ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Headline is misleading (Score:4, Informative)
2) Logon and wait for the black screen to appear
3) Make sure your PC should be able to connect to the internet (black screen does not appear to affect this)
4) Press the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys simultaneously
5) When prompted, Click Start Task Manager
6) In Task Manager Click on the Application Tab
7) Next Click New Task
8) Now enter the command:
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX"
And this my friends, is exactly why Windows is not ready for the desktop in 2009. I mean, you have to type in random junk into the command line to fix a buggy Microsoft patch - Can we expect grandma to be able to do this? More must be done to make Windows user friendly to all!
Can confirm the issue from personal experience (Score:4, Informative)
in that instance another forced reboot brought the system back as normal - I have no explanation
Hit me twice in 2 days (Score:3, Informative)
first was while playing a game online, and I though it was the game that crashed. Black screen, nothing worked, but the background music from the game kept playing. I waited longer than 5 minutes to see if the game would exit. When it did not I got suspicios since protected memory in 7 should not have allowed the gamr to crash the kernel. NOTHIGN was in the error logs related to it (other than the obligitory "you did not shut down properly" errors after I hit the reset button on the tower.
Next day, I had just turned it on about 20 minutes earlier, and the only thing running was Opera. Same deal, complete lock up.
7 has been running great on this machine since the day it hit my MAPS dowload queue and I installed it. Not one crash prior except an issue installing HP's printer system first time around (second try, it worked flawlessly).
Re:Henry Gates Ford: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Headline is misleading (Score:4, Informative)
that's actually the really dumb way of doing it. Turns out, you can just run explorer, and continue as if you had booted normally.
So:
1) Boot
2) Login
3) Get Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del)
4) File -> New Task (Run...)
5) Type "explorer" (no quotes) - Windows should now be running normally
6) Click on ericthughes's link above
7) Download and run the file they have linked there
It's even simpler if you just understand that the screen is blank because explorer (desktop process, should always be running) didn't start.
Or at least, that's how I've experienced the problem. It's not so much a BSoD as a "this process forgot to start."
Honestly, the only part that scares me is that I have to run their exe. I can function without this fix, and will wait for the official fix next week.
Re:Nice of them to change the color (Score:2, Informative)
Nvidia's entire 19x series of drivers have consistently been a problem with fallout 3, ranging from stuttering to BSOD's. I recommend installing the WHQL Release 186. I never had bluescreens, but it stuttered like mad til I reverted to 186. Got a few graphical glitches in complex geometry (clipping mostly) but they were minor and the smoothness was worth it. I'll give this to nvidia, at least they do make the earlier drivers easily available.
Now if someone could tell me which drivers will play nice with both Dragon Age and Anno 1404... Don't tell me, ATI, right?
Re:patches may make Win 7 not genuine (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Heh, simple. Don't update. (Score:3, Informative)
Cue the characteristic Slashdot flavor of older-than-you elitism! Oh wait, I'm too late...
But seriously, completely irrelevant age differences aside: There's a reason why Microsoft catches flak for security holes, and also a very good reason for why they so adamantly encourage people to update their OS as often as possible. Microsoft (and certainly your full comprehension of the vulnerability of the OS) are far from infallible; their software is extremely complicated and will always present new bugs and design flaws, and this is why they take so many measures to patch their security holes. This is true of any major software developer.
So unless your machine is not exposed to any sort of network, or unless you're running an old version of Windows that has (since 2003) had it support discontinued by Microsoft, then I argue that you don't know what you're doing.
Re:Can confirm the issue from personal experience (Score:3, Informative)
This is the one thing I wish linux had... Windows style file/directory permissions.
The 3 bit file permissions of RWX is so... 20 years ago
Not all the permissions in Windows are useful but here are a couple that I would love to see in *NIX systems -List directory contents -Create new files/folders -Delete
Sorry but after reading that, I have to conclude you are not very knowledgable about Unix and Unix-like systems. All of these apply to *nix:
A user can list the contents of a directory if he has execute (X) permissions for that directory.
A user can create new files/folders in a directory if he has write (W) permissions for that directory.
A user can delete a file if he has write (W) permissions on that file.
*nix permissions have three categories: owner, group, and all users. It does not matter for any of the above whether the necessary permissions occur because the user owns that file, is in a group that has those group permissions, or if the file has those permissions set for all users.
Delete may be a special case. For certain items like logfiles you may wish to have them writable but not deletable. For that, *nix can use file attributes to mark files as append-only.
Re:Can confirm the issue from personal experience (Score:4, Informative)
Or at the very least, just don't use AVG Free.
Last I tried it (don't know if it's improved) it would tell you about an infection in a file, but wouldn't offer any way to clean the file. To clean infections you had to manually run a full scan. IIRC, this was AVG 7, though it sounds like the behaviour of a v0.7 virus scanner to me.
When I found out that Avast Home (aka free) would not only allow me to clean infected files when they were found, but would go as far as scanning incoming HTTP replies and cutting connections if it saw an incoming infection attempt, before the data got to the browser, I switched and haven't looked back.
Re:Nice of them to change the color (Score:2, Informative)
black dont burn on CRT. On CRT black pixel are "off".
On the contrairy, black pixel is 100% "on" on LCD.
LCD block light from the backlight when they do black.
CRT dont lit up when they do black.
Micro-soft changed to black only for marketing reason.
And had it blue before for the exact same reason.