On September 10, NVIDIA release its Game-Ready driver, version 561.09. At its conclusion it asked for a reboot. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I’ll do that later.” It’s happening a LOT later than I planned, nearly 8 days on. If you look at the uptime info in the lead-in graphic you’ll see I’ve somehow managed no reboots since then. But, for the last two days this PC’s monitors have stayed dark when I’ve tried to wake it up first thing in the morning. Alas, that morning black screen recalls pending reboot, which I apparently MUST do (soon).

Note: I’ve been able to bring the desktop back from the black screen state on each of the past two days by striking CTRL-ALT-DEL at the keyboard, then canceling out of the Security Options screen that pops up. Good thing to know, in case this ever happens to you.

How Morning Black Screen Recalls Pending Reboot

Normally, when I click a mouse button or hit a keyboard key when my PC is sleeping, it starts right up. Both yesterday and today, though, I get black screens on both monitors with no cursor. Experience informs me that this is 95+% likely caused by a graphics driver issue. And as I think about it, I dimly recall installing 561.09 last week, then never following up with a reboot. If you do the math on the uptime field from WinFetch in the lead-in graphic, it was last updated on September 9,  around 3:09 PM (thanks timeanddate). Thus, it hasn’t been updated since the GPU driver got updated.

I’ve also noticed graphics running a bit slower and jerkier lately, too. It all adds up: I should’ve remembered to reboot the same day I updated NVIDIA graphics driver. But it may be too late to go back, but it’s not too late to reboot right now. And sure enough, when I do, no more black screens on startup, nor after waking from sleep (which I forced from Power > Shutdown > Sleep through the Start Menu to check).

Go figure. I should know better. This not-so-gentle reminder does the trick to help me remember this time. Isn’t that just the way things sometimes go in Windows-World?