UNSOLVED
Closed
Monitor randomly goes black for one second at a time
I have a relatively new monitor and computer system (bought May 2003) and in the past few months, the monitor will go completely black for about one second and then come back on randomly throughout the day.
It will do this completely randomly and sometimes will not occur at all for a week or so, but then without warning, will start up again, going black many times throughout the day. The diagnostic lights are all on green normally, and since the screen goes black for only one second, I don't have time to check the tower while the monitor screen is black.
The power light stays solid green with no change when the monitor goes black.
I've checked the cord connecting the monitor to the tower and it's as secure as I can push it in on both ends. A friend recommended that I get a new cord (he said it would the "HD15 (plug) SVGA monitor cable"), but I wasn't able to find anything like that on the Dell website.
Does anybody have any suggestions for what could be causing this problem, and how I can fix it?
Thanks in advance for any help.
I'll try it, but when this first started happening to me, I called Tech Support, and they told me to do that, and maybe for a month or so, I didn't have any problems, but then it started up again.
So if that's a solution, then it's only a temporary one.
I ended up calling Tech Support yesterday, and after trying a few troubleshooting ideas which didn't work, the man I spoke with said that he would put in an order to replace my monitor.
But now I'm worried, if you think it's a tower problem, maybe I should have asked for a tower replacement, especially if you have a flat screen (I don't).
I guess once the new monitor arrives, I'll see what happens.
I don't know if this will help, but it made me feel better: I called Dell Tech Support and they sent me out a new monitor (got it in less than 24 hours from when I made the call, too!) and I set it up today. While I was unplugging the old monitor, after it was unplugged from the tower, but before I unplugged the power, it did the blacking out thing. So I think it's *not* tower related.
The new monitor is working great so far, but granted, it's only been plugged in for about half an hour.
This may sound very stupid, but what is the DVI cable and what do you use it for?
The blacking out on my monitor would happen regardless of what I was doing. Since I mainly spend most of my time in Microsoft Word, I'd usually be typing when it would happen, but it would also happen when I was just surfing the web. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it.
Lea724
2 Intern
•
12 Posts
32065
0
Posted February 29th, 2004 01:00