On 22 Nov 2002, at 18:08, judy bobb wrote:

> I also have another question! Sometimes like every second or third time I
> reboot the computer it comes up with the appearance of safe mode. It is
> not in safe mode but the screen has that same gray color. Once I called
> support about it and they told me to reboot into safe mode and go into
> control panel and into device manager and remover everything under
> display adapters and monitors then reboot. Well that fixes the problem
> however it keeps happening like I said on every second or third boot.
> Can you help me with this also.

  I think this question might get better response if it were posted as a
separate message to PCBUILD....

  A big part of what makes Safe Mode look different from what you're used to
is that it bypasses the card-specific video driver (in case it's for the
wrong make/model of card) and reverts to the built-in VGA driver.
(Virtually all modern video cards include compatibility with the VGA
standard which IBM first released in 1987.)

  So it's reasonable to surmise that what you describe as "the appearance of
safe mode" is that Windows, although not actually in safe mode, has failed
to load the video driver and has reverted to its built-in default.

  There are two likely reasons why it might do this:

1.  The video driver file is corrupted, and fails to load.  This, however,
would probably happen consistently on every boot, not just every second or
third boot.  Unless the appearance of "file corruption" is actually due to a
hard drive problem -- which should manifest other symptoms as well....

2.  The video card itself may be failing or becoming unreliable, so that
code in the driver -- that tries to confirm that the video hardware is
compatible with what the driver is designed for -- decides that you have
some other sort of video card that it doesn't know how to handle.

  I'm inclined toward the latter likelihood -- that some component on your
video card has become unreliable.  The simplest fix may be a replacement of
the video card; unless you have specific high-performance requirements, you
can probably fiond something in the $50-150 range that will do nicely.

David Gillett

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