dell inspiron blacks out et al

Laptop worked fine for a year now all of a sudden is acting very strange like maybe it was dropped but it wasn't. Screen will go black (like laptop is asleep) for no reason then I have to push power button and log in again to where I was. Also laptop will not recognize any printers plugged in via USB. I get unknown USB device error over and over and over and over and over again. Again, never had this problem before. Odd I would have two brand new issues that seem completely unrelated. Any ideas. Already been through a windows reinstall with no change, been all through 'power' options and already tried to manually install printer drivers still with no change.

 

Hi,

The 'windows reinstall' you did - was it a repair or from scratch ie, format hard drive and load windows?

I have had problems with USB printers before setting up multiple instances of their drivers/software until the usb system corrupted and showed every usb device as unknown. A reinstall of windows from scratch sorted it out.

As for the blank screen my acer would do this when I had the power options set to sleep when I close the lid - when I opened the lid, the laptop would startup, but the screen stayed black with the backlight on - only way to revive would be the power off and reboot

 

Thank you for the reply. I could figure out how to format the hard drive and truly start from scratch which was what I was trying to do. The Win os disc that came with the laptop only gave the option of reinstalling windows so that is what I did. My hope is if I could do that all my troubles would be corrected. How do I format the hard drive and install windows from scratch?

 

I find doing a re-install from within windows still leaves things behind.

To do an install from scratch;

1. Make sure you save all the files, documents, favourites & passwords you need from your hard drive to a backup drive - it will be formatted blank.
2. You will need to boot from your windows cd or dvd.
3. Boot your laptop and if the optical drive is set first in the boot order you should get a prompt like "press any key to boot from cd/dvd" - if you don't and laptop boots into windows, you may have to press F12 on startup to choose which device you want to boot from
OR
you will need to go into bios and change the boot order.
4. Once you boot from cd/dvd you can follow the prompts in the windows installer - it will ask where you want to install windows and give you the opportunity to change the partition and/or format.
5. For an ultra clean install - do a proper format not a quick format, it will take longer (or very long if you have a huge hd 200gb+) but everything should be deleted.
6. Then install windows - follow the prompts and you will have to restart 2-3 times.
7. Install any service packs, restart, then your anti-virus/additional drivers etc...
8. Sit back and enjoy your laptop running as well as the first day you got it

hope that helps.