Wits End: MBP and WinXP Wont boot when not at home

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Hey guys, hoping you can help with this straaange problem. I have a history of problems getting a legitimate copy of windows XP to work on my unibody MBP. I originally had it formatted as a 32gb fat32 but once everything was up and running after about the third time restarting in windows I got to a diskcheck screen that I couldn't get by. So I reformatted as a 10gb NTFS and now I'm having a weird issue.

When I am at home, and my MBP is plugged into my external monitor, my USB hub with a couple of externals, speakers, and my firewire backup drive windows will boot up fine. But when I take it to school and try to boot into windows it will get to the black windows load screen, then the screen will go black, and then the screen will go completely black (as in unpowered) then it will briefly go back to a powered on black, then my computer will shut down and restart.

I originally thought it was just a coincidence but after trying to restart it at school about 4 times and still having no success getting it to boot I took it home and plugged it in and sure enough it booted up fine. And now that I'm back at school it won't boot again!

I really hope you guys can help me finally get windows up and running on this machine! Thanks for any help.
 

chscag

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The problem is the external monitor. When you're at school, no external monitor is available.

Why is this happening: It's because you have the external monitor setup as your primary monitor in Windows. When at home and before you leave for school, go into your graphics settings and set the internal monitor as primary and you should be OK.

Regards.
 
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Hey thanks for the reply. I brought my computer home, plugged it in and its working. Checked the NVIDIA control panel and it only has one option for ÈSeletct the display windows uses as primaryÈ and that is set as laptop display.
Also in display properties under control panel, the laptop display is set as primary as well.

I am quite perplexed :Confused:

Also, my apple keyboard is giving me some strange keystrokes, such as question mark = É and quotation mark = È But thats a whole different story!

Thanks again!
 

chscag

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Hey thanks for the reply. I brought my computer home, plugged it in and its working. Checked the NVIDIA control panel and it only has one option for Select the display windows uses as primary and that is set as laptop display.

OK. You need to update the drivers for your nVidia GPU. You should have a choice of selecting two displays from the nVidia control panel: Digital display - that would be your external, and the notebook display.

When I open my graphics control panel in Windows 7, it gives me a choice of selecting the primary display. In my case, I've selected "digital display" which is my large Samsung external monitor that I have on my desk.

If you have the wrong display selected when you're at school, Windows will not boot properly. Next time that happens, boot into SAFE mode and change the display manually and then reboot. Hold down the F8 key to boot into Windows SAFE mode.

Regards.
 
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Thanks muchly! I'll try it when I get home. Now that I think of it it is weird that It displays both displays but only has one option in the drop down. I may also switch to windows 7. I've never had much luck with xp on this machine but hopefully this will all work out.

Thanks so much for the help! It's greatly appreciated!
 
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Installed new drivers from Nvidia today and it seems to be working! Thanks again for all the help.
 

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