How is the Vista "Black Desktop/Screen" caused?

Question

Well, we just recently got that bug on our old laptop so my parents decided to return the laptop and get an exchange (lol). They keep on blaming me that my games are causing it.

So what does really cause this annoying problem?

Answer 1

In Windows 3.x the black screen of death is the behaviour that occurred when a DOS application failed to execute properly. It was often known to occur in connection with attempting certain operations while networking drivers were resident in memory. (Most commonly, but not exclusively, it was seen while the Novell NetWare client for DOS, NETX, was loaded.) The system would switch the display to text mode, but would display nothing, leaving the user looking at an entirely black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. At this point, the user could do nothing but perform a cold reboot to get the system running normally again.

According to Wallace McClure of ASP.net [1], the phrase was originally coined in the summer of 1991 by Ed Brown, a technician with Coca-Cola Company's IT department in Atlanta, GA. He reports that the company was rolling out Windows 3.0 within the Global Marketing group and when the users would attempt to run WordPerfect, they would randomly receive a BSOD.

This can also be triggered by something on the keyboard during a boot. In this case, it is accompanied by a very loud beeping sound directly from the computer itself.

On Windows Vista, some boot errors are shown on a black screen. These generally occur when winload.exe is missing or corrupted.

-L