My son is having a problem with his HP running XP, just within last several days. When he powers up, he gets the initial HP logo and so forth. Then when you would expect to see the screen for logon, the screen goes black. He has typed and entered his password, and system "sounds" as tough something is happening, but no screen ever displays. He can come up in safe mode, but can't dial out to log on anywhere. System is effectively dead. I can not see all of this as he is 1200 miles away, so this is all second hand. HP support won't talk without dollars. I suspect that hardware is all ok. Perhaps a setting someplace has gotten changed. Do not believe that anything was recently installed or changed deliberately that would have changed anything. What should he look for to verify settings for video and drivers etc. Any suggestions on how to recover or find and fix problem?
Thanks.

Hi,

It may be worth trying to roll the system back with XP's System Restore function, this tries to set the PC back to a date when the configuration of the PC was OK. This can be run from SAFE MODE. How to run System Restore