Black screen of death - even in safe mode  

Hello,

I would really appreciate some help with the following issue :)
I'm posting this in the driver section because I have a feeling that the problem is driver related. So: my brother is getting a black screen of death on his laptop. (And by that I mean a blank screen with just the cursor after login.) It doesn't matter how many times is the computer restarted, the desktop won't load. He installed some games prior to this and it seems that the Nvidia driver had some problems. I don't know exactly at which point did it stop working. Somehow there are no restore points whatsoever.
What did NOT fix the issue:
- Booting into safe mode. The black screen persists.
- Running chkdsk and sfc from RE. No problems found.
- Moving the Nvidia driver.
- Automatic startup fix in RE.
- Memory diagnostics in RE.
- Booting to last known working configuration.
Before doing a full backup and a repair or clean install I wanted to make sure that there are no other options.
Do you think I can try something else? Googling didn't give me any more ideas :P

Thanks in advance :))