Windows 10 Black Screen

Several associates of mine and I have all experienced Windows 10 black screens, pretty much since Windows 10 1903.

The symptom is that the screen turns off per your setting.

Then it won't come back on.

The PC isn't really powered down. Often you can hear the fan running or the hard drive working away.

What we have been doing is just holding down the power key until the PC shuts down. Then restarting the PC and all is well, for a while.

One of my workarounds is to disable the screen powering down and just turning the power off to it when I'm not using it.

It seems as though we're not the only people experiencing this problem.

Computerworld had a long article on this problem. This article describes 2 different black screen problems. The one I'm referencing is just a "plain and simple" black screen.

This means the screen is completely dark with nothing at all showing.

The author gives several workarounds for a black screen with a cursor but nothing for the "plain and simple" black screen except the forced power down.

What we have found is that the "plain and simple" black screen is usually the result of a display driver.

My desktop PC has an AMD Radeon R7 200 Series display adapter. Windows 10 "feature updates" love to UNINSTALL the AMD driver and use a default driver.

This results in the "plain and simple" black screen. After I reinstall the current AMD driver, my problem goes away.

One of my coworkers had to undertake a similar process for his Dell system.

Unfortunately, my other coworker ended up reimaging his PC.

If I have this again, I think I'm going to try to restart the graphics driver as an initial workaround.

Windows key + Ctrl + Shift + B

This four-key combination tells Windows 10 to restart all graphics drivers.

Then I will upgrade the graphic drivers.