So I'm coming with my head in my hands asking for somebody to help me out with my laptop.
My basic system information is as follows: http://pastebin.com/AVeGH8j6
This is only a problem I have experienced in the past few months. Basically, 90% of my games will not run in fullscreen. When I load them up, I merely get a black screen (with game audio as normal). Games that let me move to windowed using Alt+Enter then work fine in windowed mode (once I've played around a bit, as my laptop usually locks up upon game launch; I have to press Alt+Enter and then use the sleep button and load it back up to get it to respond). So if I can get them to run in windowed mode or borderless fullscreen windowed, they work fine.
Initially, I assumed it was a driver problem, so, I uninstalled my current NVidia drivers, used an online guide to delete all traces of them as suggested, then updated to the latest ones to no avail. I have even tried backdating my drivers to the ones that came preloaded. Nothing has worked. At the moment I am running the latest drivers for my GT555M (310.70) and I am still having the same problem.
I also heard it might be something to do with Avast! (my antivirus), so I uninstalled it and tried again – nothing.
Hours of trawling Google has yielded little – it's a major headache for a committed PC gamer!
N.B. some of my techy friends have suggested formatting my hard drive or reinstalling my OS, but my recovery disk was made pre-installation of SP1, which I heard makes it effectively useless, and on top of that I'd rather not lose a load of my single user licenses (e.g. MS Office). What could I do to fix this problem?
Best Answer
I have a GT 540M chipset with 314.07 drivers and have encountered this issue as well. Anytime I run any game full-screen, the display becomes completely unresponsive and I have to put my laptop in standby mode to minimize it.
I discovered that turning V-sync on through the game config files or by forcing V-sync on through the nVidia Control Panel fixes this issue.
I have no idea why this works or if there is a way to run full-screen games without V-sync.
I hope this helps! :)