Friend's OS Won't Load

From my friend's LJ:

My computer worked fine last night. I went to bed, tried to turn it on this morning, and my OS won't load. The computer it self wil turn on and the monitor is functioning because I can access some of those controls that show up when you hit F5 or F12 on the boot up screen. After that, though, nothing happens. The screen goes blank. Suggestions? BTW, its definitely past warrantee.

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He's running some model of Dell XPS, I believe, with XP. Beyond that, I don't know much. Thought I'd throw it up here and see what you guys thought. Thanks!

Could be a power supply/heat issue.

Ask him if his BIOS is doing the memory test during bootup too.

Can he boot into safe mode? My computer did that a little while ago when I downloaded some hardware drivers with my Windows Update. Big mistake. I forget which one messed it up, but it installed a new video card driver and a new monitor driver, and one of them messed me up big time.

When your machine is first booting up it uses standard settings for your monitor/video card, but once it boots into Windows it uses whatever drivers you have, and if one of those drivers are corrupted or broken somehow you get a black screen. Try booting into safe mode and either rolling back the drivers or installing the latest drivers from your monitor's and video card's websites or from the CD that came with your computer. Do not install drivers from any other sources (including Windows Update!) because they may be untrustworthy.