Fixing display issue acer extensa 5620

[nekronos]

This is something I have never come across before, quite peculiar.

One day I shut my laptop off, and the following week upon booting it up, I can't see any text. the first picture shows the login screen for vista which i clicked the shutdown button, instead of the option to hibernate/shutdown, etc you see an up and down arrow. This holds true for any menu drop down, etc you may click on. Also on the login screen, you can't see the box for the password, I managed to login by typing it anyways. the second pic notes the lack of text where the menu bar would be as well as for the icons. Like i said before, if you click on the "file" drop down from the menu bar, you see an up and down arrow. Also I can't click on start button.

What I think may be related, I noticed receiving an error "display driver stop working" or something like that "ifgx" maybe. a few times as a balloon on the taskbar, screen flashed once but everything worked fine. So I thought perhaps the display driver is corrupted, possibly the integrated video is toast.

Note this runs windows vista, Acer Extensa 5620-6419 Laptop.

I'm not really sure what this falls under, since I don't know if its a motherboard/software/video driver/video card issue.

Has anyone come across this before, any thoughts?

There is a glare in the second pic, I can take additional pics if it would help anyone.

 

[SuperDuper931]

The issue you are experiencing seems to be software related, at least from what I can tell. There are no hardware issues that I would know of that would cause Windows not to display text. I have just a few more questions to better troubleshoot this issue.
1) Does text only not appear in the Explorer windows or does text not appear in other third-party applications such as Google Chrome or Spotify?
2) What version of your graphics driver are you running?
3) Did you run any updates right before this occurred?
4) Click on the start menu -> right-click "Computer" -> select "Manage" -> go to "Event Viewer" -> Go to "Windows logs" -> select "Applications" and try to find detailed information on your "display driver stop working" error message. The log information can be very helpful on pinpointing the issue.

 

[nekronos]

Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunetly I am unable to access anything aside from the icons on the desktop, navigation is rather limited. I can't utilize the start menu at all. After searching again, I think the error I had seen a few times before the laptop became the way it is now was "Display driver xxxxx stopped responding and was recovered"

1) Text does not appear in windows for the most part. The address bar will not display text in firefox, however I can view the pages content. (essentially blindly typing in sites to view them.)
Another program I was able to view is the Gleim software, a CPA review course, it seems to function as normal inside its window.
Some software will not display correctly, such as malwarebytes, tried that and its a single color box with nothing in it (most likely the user access control which pops up for most software). Tried a few others, seems any software that doesn't require user access control permission will at least run, then again.. tried SmartFTP, it ran but all I see is a single color in the entire window.
Seems Gleim is the only software aside from Firefox I can get to run.

I uploaded a new pic, this shows 3 things, top left I right click on "my computer", the 2 windows to the right I opened with a shortcut. the top is what happens when first double clicking, the second is what happens when I click the double arrow in the first window.

As for the version of the driver, I have no idea, I would assume what it was initially came with, I downloaded the newest driver from acer's site as well as Intel's (apparently different..)

As for updates, it is possible, it was set to automatic updates but I do not remember whether or not it did.

Any suggestions as to how to get the driver version, and install a new one if its old, by means other than the GUI?

I just tried installing a driver off a flash drive but it won't let me do anything really.

Note: these pics are taken with my cellphone, as I can't perform a proper screen shot via the laptop.

 

[nekronos]

Saddens me no one tried to help aside from one

The only solution to this I could think of was to buy an external enclosure for the laptop drive... I am currently backing the data up and will attempt a factory reset/recovery in hopes it will work again the way it should. I was hoping someone would have a thought of fixing it without doing something like that

 

[SuperDuper931]

Sorry I didn't respond to you sooner regarding this. I had just gotten back to the US from Mexico and had some catching up to do in a couple classes.

Anyway, seeing as this is nothing that I have ever encountered before, I think the only solution may be to attempt a clean installation of Windows. But, if you haven't already done so, you can open up the command prompt by hitting the Windows key -> typing "cmd" -> right-click on the cmd application and selecting "run as administrator."

After launching the command prompt with admin privs, try typing in the command "sfc /scannow" without the quotation marks . This will scan the integrity of your system files and replace the missing/corrupt files for you.

 

[SuperDuper931]

Also, have you ran any anti virus software to check if malicious software could be affecting your system?
Furthermore, do you encounter the same issue when booting into safe mode?

 

[chudddds]

try a system restore

 

[nekronos]

No worries and thanks for the replies. I have said though that I'm unable to click or use the start button, so I'm afraid that won't work either. I tried malwarebytes with no luck (see above posts).

I have tried safe mode and low res vga mode, no difference with either.

 

[SuperDuper931]

It seems that essential system files are missing. Here is another way to attempt to run the sfc /scannow without using the start menu. Hit Windows key + R to open the run prompt. In the run prompt you will need to type in the command "runas /user:username* cmd" and hit the enter key on your keyboard. You will need to type the command without the quotation marks and replace the username* text with the name of your administrative user account on your computer. When the command prompt launches, you will need to enter your admin password correctly or the prompt will close.

An easy way to do this would be to start the computer in safe mode with command prompt and run the sfc /scannow as well.

 

[nekronos]

Ok, I am trying that as we speak, I booted in safe mode with command prompt and it is scanning now. I just finished backing the data off the drive as well so if this doesn't fix it, all I can think of is doing a full system restore/factory reset.

It just finished,

"Beginning verification phase of system scan
verification 100% complete"

"Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.Log windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log

The system file repair changes will take effect after the next reboot."

Amazingly it seems to be booting fine after that, though it is quite sluggish. The desktop flashes a white background for a few seconds a few times initially while booting completely (unusual).

Going to run malwarebytes and windows update, may also uninstall mcafee (incredibly outdated.. had a year trial) and put the free avast/avg on it. Any suggestions to follow up the sfc scan? I will probably reset this to factory in any case after I finish this semester of grad school - last one. So I just need it to hold out till then. Thanks again

 

[SuperDuper931]

Remember, just in case anything goes wrong again, it is always a good idea to have a back up. The issue with the flashing background probably pertains to your graphics driver failing. If you run a Windows update, it should pick up an updated version of the graphics driver, just remember to include optional updates when installing.

If the graphics driver does not update, you could always download it from here: http/support.acer.com/product/default.aspx?modelId=725 . If you don't know which one to download, try to contact Acer so they can lead you on how to do so.

Also, one of the best and most efficient antivirus programs I have ever used is Microsoft's very own antivirus which can be downloaded here http/windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials . I have not seen it noticeably impact any of the machines I have ran it on, even machines with low specs. To top it off, it is entirely free.

 

[SuperDuper931]

Oh, and, just as a reminder, don't forget to choose a best reply

 

[nekronos]

Yep, I'm glad I backed up all my data already, while doing so I noticed I had several "cyclic redundancy errors" and to make sure it wasn't due to the drive I was copying data to I tried another drive and had the same error. This only happened on some files, but it seemed to be at random, probably <20 out of the roughly 80 GB of data I backed up (mostly pictures, music and video). That's whole another issue though.

I have already downloaded the drivers, one from Intel and one from acer.

I'll try that anti-virus, I hadn't even heard of it! :O

Thanks again, I'll have to make a note of that "sfc /scannow"

 

[nekronos]

Best answer selected by nekronos.

 

[chudddds]

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