Two incidents: Last night, I had my HP Pavilion dv9620us notebook PC running, and was using both Microsoft Word (with a few windows open) and Internet Explorer. (I'm running Windows Vista.) I went away for a little while, and when I came back, the screen was dark, as it should have been to save either power or the display (I don't know which). But its power light was flashing (blue, if it matters--that's its usual color), and when I pressed the power button, which usually makes it shut down or start up, nothing happened. I tried pressing, pressing and holding it down, pressing and holding it down for quite a while--nothing happened. It was as though it were frozen, apart from the blinking light. Eventually I got up to look up the problem on our other computer, lost lots of time trying to guess the password because my nephew had uncharacteristically gone to bed early, then returned and half-heartedly pressed the power button again, holding it down--and the computer magically started up again. Then today (the next day), the same thing happened, only this time it did start up after only a few pressing-the-power-button tries--again when I held it down. Three questions: (a) What does this mean (what is the problem)? (b) What can I do to make sure it starts up if this happens again? (c) How, in language that my mother could understand, can I fix this problem?
Well, the first thing to try would be use Vista's System Restore to go back to a date previous to when the problem started. Could be that an auto-update to windows or a program has caused the problem, and System Restore will undo that update without harming any of your data or settings.
Click the Start button, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore.
Just follow the prompts to find a date previous to last night and follow the instructions to do the restore.
If that doesn't fix it, you might want to look at the system log to see what (if any) updates were recently installed that might have caused the problem.
Donk
Hi, Donk. I tried System Restore, twice, with two different restore points, but it failed both times. (Everything seemed to work until my laptop had shut down and started back up and I had logged in again, at which point I got a message saying that System Restore had failed to complete and suggesting that I might want to try again, perhaps with a different restore point.) Should I worry about that?
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