My sister just bought a new Dell laptop a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, she already started to run into a few problems. In particular, she was getting a blank screen right after she got past the Windows login screen.

I started debugging by trying ctrl+alt+delete at the blank screen and then attempting to run explorer.exe. Luckily, this worked, kind of, and I was able to see the normal desktop. However, when I tried to run Firefox, IE, or a few other programs, they would not start correctly.

Debugging in Safe Mode

After this, I decided it was time to start debugging in safe mode. For those who don’t know, you can access safe mode by hitting F8 while the computer is starting up. I noticed that the computer would work fine in safe mode. At this point, I decided to run a few quick virus scans using Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes. The scans from these 2 programs showed the laptop to be free of malware. This led me to believe that a service or driver of some sort could be causing the issue.

Disabling Services Using MSConfig

Next, I opened the startup manager by hitting the start button and typing msconfig into the “Search Files and Folders” box. This brought up the system configuration manager which allows you to enable/disable certain services. Since I noticed the laptop working ok in safe mode, I disabled all services that weren’t already currently running in safe mode with networking. Keep in mind, that by doing this, many things won’t work such as printers, some devices, and even sound. After a restart, I noticed that the computer worked fine except that some functionality was not working.

Next, I started to turn services back on a few a time to try to see what service was causing the problem. In the end, I believe it ended up being some type of printer service (not the printer spooler) that was causing the problem. It is possible my sister used a few different printers that were either conflicting with each other or with another service.

Hopefully if you ever run into this problem, my experience can help you solve your problem. Also, I troubleshoot PCs quite often, so I wanted to go through my thought process when it comes to a problem so that you can use this general thought process to solve a problem.

Have you seen a similar issue? Do you use a different process to troubleshoot PC problems? Let us know in the comments section!