[BigChiefHH]

I've been having an issue with my computer that I can't seem to find a solution to. I'm running an HP Pavillion dv9000 laptop with Vista Home Premium, SP1. My first issue is a random blank screen. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, the screen will just go blank. It's still back-lit, so it's not the hardware, it's just as if it's going into a screen saver or hibernate mode, but it hasn't been set to that, and no mouse movement or key press will "wake it up". I've had to force shutdown when this happens. When it reboots, it's all fine. It's possible this is due to some overheating, but it's unlikely. The second issue, and probably easiest to figure out is a random beep coming from inside the computer, which I believe I've seen described elsewhere as a graphics card or something running it's diagnostic or setup and beeping as it's done. This is a single beep, without any follow up or any other issue that I can see. It doesn't affect anything, nor is it predictable. If I can prevent this, or know that it's normal, then I'll be happy. One other issue that's more annoying than anything, is that Vista doesn't seem to want to remember that I've changed my cursor to something personalized when it boots up. I have to go in and change it back to the personalized one after startup. Any way to make it remember? Or is this just one of the bugs in Vista?

The major issue, however is a restart/reboot issue. When I tell the computer to restart for whatever reason, which I mean shutting down, and rebooting almost immediately, the computer will not reboot properly. It will begin to start up, but will fail within a few seconds. When I push the power button again, it will start and fail again. It usually takes two or three cycles (sometimes more), with no notion of time between attempts. Most time it doesn't make it to any Windows startup screen, however, it has gotten to where the little bar scrolls the green boxes and says Microsoft a couple of times before it's shut off. This issue doesn't happen if I've shut the computer down and left it sit for a while, like overnight or if I've driving somewhere and open it up at my destination. If I shut the computer lid and hibernate it, it wakes up like normal when reopened. I removed some programs from my startup folder in the start menu recently, but I only saw those as software that I didn't want hogging the startup cycle. If there was something in there that I should have left that would be causing this, then I need to know what, and how to put it back. The only reason I see the two as connected is that this issue didn't start until after I removed the items from this startup folder. I don't see any error messages with this, nor does it want to start in safe mode. I've had the computer since March or April, and if I need to get it in for repair before the year warranty is up, I need to know soon.

Thanks for all your help, if you need more info, let me know. I've run Ad-aware, Spybot, and am about to run an AVG full (recently acquired) but I've had AVG Free and nothing found in previous scans with that.

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My apologies for bumping this, but somebody has to know something.

[BigChiefHH]

My apologies for bumping this, but somebody has to know something.

[Blood Elemental]

You can try running memtest86+ to check your RAM.

http://www.memtest.org/

[BigChiefHH]

Good morning.

Link


The following concerns the restart/reboot issue in the second paragraph:

In that thread, Blood Elemental suggested I run memtest86+. I didn't run that, but did download and run memtest and came up with no errors. I also contacted HP, and their support had me run a BIOS scan on the hard drive, and that didn't show anything, and they were no help (supposed to re-contact me, and never did). One of the other causes that I can think of, that I forgot to mention in that thread is that I had recently installed a version of Combat Flight Sim around the same time this started, and while playing, it overheated (I should have had my chill mat) and froze, and it might be possible that when I tried to shut down and restart, this is when it first started this reboot problem. I downloaded all the files off a disk for this program, and if necessary, I can burn a new copy and delete it from the computer and see if this would solve the problem.

Thanks.

Posted on 28 DEC 08, and I didn't think to post it in here until today. Oops.