Boots to black screen

[Sanguimancer]

I'm running Vista on a really terrible Compaq laptop. I was just using it as a backup laptop but my monitor died on my main machine. Now I'm having issues with the laptop. When I try to boot normally it gets through all the bios stuff and then tries to boot Windows and the screen promptly turns off. It's not rendering a black screen, the screen is actually off completely. I'm assuming this is a video card issue, the vid card is probably dead. I can, however, boot to safe mode and the screen is fine. Safe mode uses the CPU to render the screen, correct? Is there some way for me to boot to normal windows but not use the video card to render the screen? Can I tell windows to use whatever it is using to boot to safe mode when it boots to normal windows?

[shadowpr]

If you can boot into safe mode fine, then I would think it's a driver issue.

You can try reinstalling the video drivers. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/cpq_support.html