Drivers

Hi Grumpy44,

What is the model of your Dell PC? When the screen fades, does it say exactly what is not responding?

Vista Home  Inspiron 531 it just says  windows is not responding and then it will fade it has been like it for some time and is slow to respond when it does its ok till i use it the next day very strange today i switched it on no problem it was ok went straight to my emails and saw your message so thank you for your reply but maybe tomorrow it will fade again it only happens from time to time when in use sometimes screen will darken and  when i press start button it comes back to normal  updates windows says everything is updated i have updates every day also when i start up message from windows saying blocked programme which is google so i have to go trough pressing things to get to google how can i stop windows from blocking google  in start up. Regards Grumpy44  ps 

Ok, let's work on the faded screen thing. I think this is likely a problem with your video card device driver. So I want you to go HERE and under video, find your video card, download the driver and install it.

In order to prevent Vista from blocking Google on startup, you need to change your User Account Control (UAC) restrictions. See this article for instructions on how to fix this.

While it seems a driver issue, you are best to run the F12 preboot diagnostics in case your hardware is failing:

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/f12-preboot-diagnostics/

It could also be a good idea to perform a clean installation of Windows Vista or Upgrade (via a clean install) to Windows 7 64 Bit or Windows 8.1 64 Bit.