Like many computer techs who work on a lot of computers for people routinely, I too have fallen into the rut of always assuming a virus first. Unlike most though, I like to try to fix the virus instead of wiping and reinstalling for a couple of reasons. First is that I like to see and learn about new viruses and what better way to learn than by seeing it’s behavior while removing it. Secondly, I enjoy giving the owner happiness in knowing that I’ve restored their computer to it’s previous state with all their data and programs in place. There are several schools of thought on this and both sides have good points but I tend to believe that I can usually find and eradicate the virus. I generally will verify this with by sniffing the outbound network traffic to make sure it’s not visiting foreign lands without my knowledge.
One of my wife’s colleagues came by today with her laptop running Vista(yeesh!). It’s a Toshiba Satellite A305-S6841 that’s a year old or so. The symptom is that it would boot all the way up to a black screen. Nothing on the screen at all until you waited 10 minutes for the screen saver to click on. At that point, you’d see that activate. That’s how I knew it was booted. Next of course, I tried safe mode. To my surprise, safe mode booted without a hitch. While in safe mode, I ran malwarebytes and to my surprise, yet again, the scan came back as clean and flawless…
That’s not where I would naturally stop thinking there was a virus but this time I decided to google the term “windows vista boots to black screen”. I found that I was by far not the only person to google that term and fairly quickly I was able to find a workable solution. What I did was boot into safe mode and delete the display adapter driver. Then I rebooted and the system came right up. It was using an ugly generic display driver but that at least allowed my to go onto Toshiba’s site and get the new driver and reinstall it. After that, it worked flawless again.
So in summation, a bit of research and trouble shooting has saved myself and someone else countless hours of reinstalling. The graphics driver was apparently corrupted and it is HIGHLY likely to happen again at some point. I’m sorry Bestbuy but I’m calling you out here; Reinstalling is NOT always the answer to every little computer problem.
