Windows XP, SP2
I was playing Civ4 two days ago and got a bluescreen. The computer restarted before I had a chance to read what it said.
The computer rebooted fine after that and worked until earlier this evening when I tried playing Civ4 again. The game loaded up but the screen went blank while waiting for the saved game to resume. The screen stayed blank for about 10 minutes (I was watching fox news and kept track of the time with their onscreen clock) before I tried powering down and booting again.
When I tried to boot up again, I didn’t get any power to the screen. The power LED came on, the disk drive LED flashed for a few seconds, but that was it.
I went downstairs and borrowed a family-member’s computer to check for solutions on the HP website. It said the problem was a BIOS issue. It recommended removing the battery and any peripherals, then attempting to boot the computer. It booted, and it further recommended running the HP software update to download a new bios.
I ran the update, but a new BIOS was not one of the options.
The first update downloaded and installed, then the computer rebooted. After restarting, it began downloading the second update but the computer froze after a few minutes. I tried moving the mouse but the cursor didn’t respond, so I powered down after a few minutes of that.
When I tried restarting, once again the screen did not even power up, it just stayed dead and black.
I contacted HP support and they instructed me to reinstall the OS. When I powered on the ocmputer to open the cd-rom drive, low and behold, it booted. The computer ran for a good 3 minutes before freezing again like before. Then it refused to reboot.
Another ten minutes go by while I talk to another HP technician who tells me to enter BIOS. Rather than tell her that I can’t even get the screen to light up, I humour her and suddenly it starts to boot. I enter the BIOS and she has me run the HDD scan. The screen freezes after it