Vista - I can't play my games anymore!?

About a few months ago I can still play games like Combat Arms, Call of Duty 4, BioShock, and Dead Space at minimal performance. But now, I reinstalled the game to play it again and it just got stuck on the Starting Screen or just plain BLACK Screen! I can still play some MMORPG like Sword of the New World: Granado Espada or the recently Closed-Beta, Luna Online just fine. I don't know what I did wrong with my Dell XPS Laptop. Any help will be apreciated.

My System Specs:
OS Name Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Version 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 Build 6001
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer Dell Inc.
System Model XPS M1530
System Type X86-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5450 @ 1.66GHz, 1667 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Dell Inc. A05, 11/17/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume3
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.0.6001.18000"

The only thing I noticed with Vista and games is sometimes a game will load and you get to a black menu screen for the game. I play Silent Hunter 4 and the first time I loaded the game in Vista I had not issues at all. Me being me messed up how to handle admin account and user account so I did a clean install to start over. Once done I loaded Silent Hunter 4 again to play. No issues, loaded fine. I clicked to play and I got the load screen. Once I got to the menu of the game it was nothing but a black screen. I could hear the music and see my mouse cursor but nothing else. So, what I had to do was go to my videocard tweak program ( I just use the one offered by Nvidia, it works fine) and reset my video card to all the default values. Should be just a box to check and apply to reset to defaults. Once done, I ran the game and all was fine. I closed the game out and reset my videocard back up to the tweaks I like. My game ran fine every since. Give it a shot, it worked for me.

thanks, will try it out.

Update: It didn't work.

any other helpful how-to/s? anyone?

Did you install any new drivers before this started happening? Dell laptops are neutorious for having problems with video, they wont play Battlefield 2 for instance because the screen is locked at a 63hz refreshrate.

Other than that have you tried giving the thing a good clean? Defrag, disk cleanup, blow the dust out of it that sort of thing.

Other problems could be things like Antivirus a friend of mine has one of those laptops and the mcaffee antivirus it came with picks the worst times to start a background scan. try turning it off along with anything else you dont need before starting a game.

No I didn't installed any new drivers and I'm using Advast Antivirus is not interfering with the games. I think it's a corrupted software, deleted software or .dll that's interfering. And one more thing, when I tried to fix Windows using the Windows Vista OS DVD, it doesn't the "Repair Windows" option anymore.

It could be a windows service going funny, I take it when you say blackscreen you mean the black screen of total doom where everything locks up and all you can do is coldboot. That screen can be caused by allsorts of things though, including overheats or corrupted videofiles.

Since this is happening to alot of games as you say and others are running slower than they used to lends itself more to the machine being bogged down doing other things than files being corrupted.

Is the laptop in itself behaving slowly or is it just games?

as for things to try I would still suggest blowing the dust out, a buildup of dust can severely dent performance especially in laptops. If you have a hairdryer or something that blows cold air just hold it to one of the airvents for a second or two (no longer than that you dont want it heating the inside up)

When I turn the game on, the screen goes black and the arrow turns into the Loading Circle then nothing else happens. When I you try to force close the game window (Alt+F4) it chimes the error sound.

and, the laptop is behaving fine but the games that I used to play just got stuck on the black screen or the loading game screen.

also, I will try to dust out my laptop. Any progress I will update with an edit.

Edit: No, seems that it's not the hardware either.

Anyone knows any app program to recover missing .dll or missing system devices?