Hp Pavilion - Greyscale Screen Nightmare

We had this weird problem for the second time with our laptop screen last night. All of a sudden, the system crashes and reboots (way to go Windows!). After the reboot, while loading the startup programs, the colored screen becomes black and white -- or grayscale if you prefer to call it that.

Fixed it eventually. I though I just might as well post it so that (1) I can refer to it incase ithis happens again for the nth time; and (2) I hope it can help others out there who might have the same problem.

BTW, we are using the HP Pavilion dv6000 Series running Windows Vista with all the latest patches, as of this writing. Won't list the other software that I have installed, coz that's just insane! Anyway, not sure if these same steps would apply to other laptops models or other OS. So please don't complain to me! I'm not an HP tech. If you've got the time and money, call the HP Support, not me. :)

We did some research and apparently, this is a common problem with HP Pavilion dv6000 series. And you can see the countless number of people in forums saying "HP sucks" as well as "You're screwed! Buy a new NON-HP laptop". Quite entertaining, actually.

Nevertheless, I know this is not a hardware issue like the ones discussed in the forums. In our case, before the startup programs are loaded, the screen is actually colored. In BIOS, the progress bar saying "Loading Windows" or "Resuming Windows", even the actual login page are all colored. It's only after login and during the loading of the startup programs when "the world becomes sad and the colors fade away." :)) So this tells me that this is a software problem. The laptop did crash after all, so who knows what software settings/registry keys/whatever were changed or corrupted on the fly. Tried to search for these to no avail.

Anyway, here's what I did on both previous instances that I got this problem:

1. Restart Windows
2. Press F8 to enter the boot selection menu.
3. Select the "Load last known working configuration".
4. Login as usual and confirm if the color is fixed. If not (which is the most likely scenario), restart again.
5. Press F8.
6. Select the "Repair" option on top.
7. Follow through until all the checks have been made. Reload once prompted to do so.
8. Login and confirm if the color is back to normal.

And there you go. I did these exactly the same twice and in both instances they were fixed. Not sure if there's anything with the order that makes it work or not work. I initially tried the "repair" option first, but that didn't work. I had to revert to the last known working configuration before doing the repair. Don't know what's going on in there, but, as long as it works, that's fine with me.

I just hope that this never happens again. But if it does happen again, I hope these same steps are all I need to fix it.