The lights are on, but nobody's home (Windows 7 booting issues)

I have Windows 7 installed on my SSD, so it normally boots up in a few seconds. I have a GTX 560 connected to my monitor via HDMI.

About a week ago I've developed an issue when turning on my PC in the morning. When I press the power button, I see the ASUS motherboard logo, and then the Windows logo, but then instead of being greeted to my desktop, the screen goes black and remains black. (the fans keep running). It looks is as if the monitor is not connected to the graphics card… and if I switch the output on my monitor it says HDMI no signal.

The only solution I've come up with so far is to hold down the power button to turn it off. Then when I power it on again, it boots up fine. Of course, since my PC wasn't shut down properly, Windows wants to launch Startup repair; w/ the option to do a system restore; which I have tried, but the issue persists. I've also run CHKDSK.

So for now, this is a minor annoyance, but obviously having to do a hard shutdown everyday isn't the best long term solution and I'm concerned this may be a sign that my PSU, SSD, RAM, etc. is dying. Or maybe it's worth trying another HDMI cable? Or using a DVI cable? I know I have some around here somewhere.

After the issue started, I updated my NVIDIA drivers to the latest version, and I have not made any hardware changes since the computer was first built. I even suspected my optical wired mouse, which is starting to die, could be the culprit since bad peripherals have given me weird problems before. But I tried a new wireless keyboard w/ built in trackpad and still having the issue.

If any more information is needed let me know. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Dave

Since it's a week old problem, I'd go for system restore because it smells like borked windows update.

A note though. GTX 560 was my good old card I gave out because TW3.
But GTX 560 is a good enough reason to upgrade the machine to windows 10. Which is still free. So I suggest to do that.

Yeah what Joxer said. See if you can boot into safe mode and roll back to before the problem started.

Well, something more time consuming is to look into the windows startup logs or event log, to see if there are some errors there.. might be you can find the reason from those.