USB to VGA adapter has ruined Windows 10. Help

dlresponse · 13 Aug 2015 at 10:13

My mum wanted 3 displays on her laptop HP Pavillion core i5 Laptop (8gb ram, 1 tb drive) She bought two VGA monitors off Ebay and asked my Dad to set it up for her. For some inexplicable reason my Dad decided to install a USB to VGA adapter rather than a HDMI to VGA adapter for the second VGA monitor.

He has installed the software and now they have no display at all and no windows 10. I am going to try to sort the situation out in about an hour so I don't know if Windows 10 isn't loading at all or it is loading but the software has messed up the display configuration.

To make things worse we also have no Windows 10 set up disk because they used the free upgrade option from Windows 8.1 64 bit.

I have never installed a USB to VGA device before so if anybody has any ideas about what I could try to get the situation sorted I would appreciate it.

Ethan62 · 13 Aug 2015 at 10:49

The USB-VGA device will appear as an additional graphics card in device manager. Usually with third party software for managing display settings.

Never seen it effect the existing displays though.

Falkentyne · 13 Aug 2015 at 11:00

Have you tried safe mode?
Windows 10 still has safe mode and there should still be boot options with last known working configuration.

It's almost impossible to break safe mode unless system files are missing.
Then you can install "Display driver uninstaller" which should wipe all the existing display devices and drivers, and then you can reinstall.

Now you know never to let your parents install stuff

dlresponse · 13 Aug 2015 at 13:05

listen guys this problem is more serious than I first thought.

as soon as windows 10 starts loading I get the blue screen of death which says "SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION ddkmd.sys"

Then windows reboots into diagnostic mode. I then tried to reset windows 10 which took 40 minutes and I am still getting the same error

My dad has bought a crappy usb to vga adapter with some very dubious installation software. I think this is the culprit.

How do I boot to safe mode? This is really serious now because if I have to factory reset the laptop I am not sure if that wipes the hard drive or not

Falkentyne · 14 Aug 2015 at 13:19

Sounds like a format and reinstall is in order.
Just do it. It will save you more time and effort than trying to fix something like this.

And please (Sorry for any disrespect here), don't let your parents within 10 feet of any computer software/hardware that YOU don't approve of yourself.

There are so many cheap/Chinese knockoffs/counterfeit/half working devices out there that only trusted reviews/forum feedback /known brands can tell you what is actually safe or not.