I have a four or five y/o Dell P4 with windows XP.  It has been running great, however yesterday I turned it on and ablack DOS screen came up SAYING that the computer either had a power FAILURE or otherwise was not shut down properly.  It the asks if you WANT to start in safe mode or the last conig that worked or start as normal.  I tried all three, three different times and got the same result which is the Windows XP start screen which is Black with the Windows XP logo and the status bar on the bottom.  After that is DONE it turns to what I would call an "active black screen."  You can see that there is a signal but no info is being transmitted.

I opened the computer, checked to see if everything was in place.  I TOOK out the RAM and other cards to reseat them but the same thing happens.

I know the easy answer is to reformat.  I will reformat, but... as I do normally save all of my info on a external HD the last month or so I did not save.  Why?  because I am an idiot.  So I would like to get on the computer, save what I need to save then reformat.  Or maybe it is beyond reformating.

Does anyone have any help?

Thank You!
Sorry.  JUst read through some more posts and found my question answered already.  I will try those ideas.

ThanksIt's nice to see you've checked if a similar problem has been answered already, saves us some work

But for reference, could you please post a link of the post you are using?

Good luck with the ideas.Sorry about that.  Still learning.  

I tried everything that I could think of.  Any other ideas?just a suggestion...

This happened to me after I got my Dell and I had a friend from Sweden go through MSN messenger to fix it.

He found out my NVIDIA driver needed to be updated...
He went to the website and downloaded the driver update and
after that it was fixed...