Awesome Techs

Earlier PrevX, UK-based software security firm, claimed that the main cause of Windows Black Screen Of Death was recent Microsoft Windows Updates. Yesterday they posted an entry in their blog saying that, changes in the Windows Registry that trigger the behaviour might be caused by malware or some other factor, which it is yet to pin down, but not the Windows update.

The Blog Post Says,

The issue appears to be related to a characteristic of the Windows Registry related to the storage of string data. In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null terminated “REG_SZ” string. However, if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.

They also apologized for the earlier blog post which pointed out the Microsoft Security Update was the reason.

We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar.

Microsoft was sure about that, the updates were not the reason behind this. They pointed out this at their technet blog post. It says,

We’ve conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security updates we released through Windows Update in November. That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don’t believe the updates are related to the “black screen” behavior described in these reports.

See here for the earlier Reports regarding this.

Almost all of you are aware of the (in)famous ‘Blue screen of death‘ a.k.a. ‘BSOD’.

Its nothing but a colloquialism used for the error screen displayed by some operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error that can cause the system to shut down to prevent irreversible damage to the system’s integrity. It serves to present information for diagnostic purposes that was collected as the operating system issued a bug check.

Now this will happen if you have corrupt driver, corrupt softwares, bad hardwares etc etc.

But now comes Black Screen of death. Now this time it comes because of nothing but the famous windows Update Patches. The latest Windows Update Patches are causing some systems “Black Screen of Death“.

The Security firm PrevX have reported this issue, And they are offering a free tool to fix this Black Screen of Death.

How to Fix Black Screen of Death

PrevX is offering a free tool for fixing Black Screen of Death.

The Steps as prevX says to fix this are:

1) Restart your PC

2) Logon and wait for the black screen to appear

3) Make sure your PC should be able to connect to the internet (black screen does not appear to affect this)

4)Press the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys simultaneously

5) When prompted, Click Start Task Manager

6) In Task Manager Click on the Application Tab

7) Next Click New Task

Now enter the command:

“C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe” “http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX”

Note this command assumes that you are using internet explorer as your browser, of not substitute your browser path and file details for thos of iexplore.exe or use the Browser option of Task manager to locate it.

9) Click OK and your browser should start up and begin the download process

10) When prompted for the download Click run, the black screen fix program will download and run to automatically fix the issue.

11) Now restart your PC and the black screen problem will hopefully be gone.

But this will not Fix all kind of Black Screen of Deaths, simply cause there could be a million reasons why it happened. But if it is happened by the latest Windows Update, you can try this tool as most probably this will help you.

And another workaround is:

When the Black Screen of death appears, just hit ctrl+alt+del a few times.

Then you will get the option for taskmanager, take that.

Then goto process tab and find out if explorer.exe is working. If its there right click and click on end process tree.

Then Goto Applications tab, and then select the new process button. In the prompted window just type explorer.exe and press enter.

As I said earlier , The cause of Black Screen of Death can be a million, so this work around also will not work for all types of Black Screen Of Death.